ATM: Stranger Than Fiction

It took me two days to get through this film. It wasn't horrible but I could have used the time more effeciently.....like cleaning the toilet or something (Guntarski).

The Facts of Death

Stranger Than Fiction lacks both realism and imagination.

by Sean Burns

Finally, a Charlie Kaufman movie for people who are too stupid to understand Charlie Kaufman movies.

Proving once and for all the suits in Hollywood can co-opt and dumb down anything remotely resembling an original thought, director Marc Forster’s Stranger Than Fiction looks like the long-sought-after corrective to surprise hits like Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Boiling a lot of complex considerations down into basic banalities, this movie is Adaptation for imbeciles.

Will Ferrell stars as woebegone IRS auditor Harold Crick, a completely miserable shell of a man with no hopes or dreams of his own, trudging through his sorry day-to-day existence, until one morning he starts to hear an omniscient female voice (Emma Thompson) describing his every move in lugubrious, overwrought prose.

Indeed it turns out Harold is just another sad-sack character in the oeuvre of famed novelist Kay Eiffel (Thompson, duh), and he accidentally overhears she’s planning to kill him off sometime before the end of the next book.

As timing is everything in life (and death), Harold just happened to start auditing a hotsie anarchist bakery owner, played with no shortage of bad tattoos and irritating “spunk” by Maggie Gyllenhaal. For the first time in Crick’s wretched life, he’s finally falling in love—but that pesky narrator’s voice is hinting he won’t feel it for long.

A logistical and thematic disaster on so many levels it’s honestly tough to sit down and choose where to start, Stranger Than Fiction makes no sense—a complaint that probably wouldn’t register if the movie had been carried off with anything resembling wit, style, verve or excitement.

Zach Helm’s screenplay has been kicking around town for so long it’s gathered some sort of legendary status. But alas, Forster, one of the worst, most overwrought directors in cinema­—yes, the guy who made his career by shooting half of that inadvertently hilarious Monster’s Ball sex scene from inside an empty birdcage—has little understanding of how to make a moment work. He’s one of those kids who seems interested only in calling attention to his absurd directorial showmanship.

Stranger Than Fiction is so insanely stylized the entire production design is an art school project gone horribly awry. The design is sparse and empty—every set looks like Dave Bowman’s hotel room at the end of 2001. All the wrong colors, the movie is awash in pasty egg-whites, muddy burgundies and diarrhea browns—there won’t be a more aesthetically unpleasant picture this year.

Forster has directed his cast to behave like zombies. A concept this fundamentally silly should’ve flown by in a blink, but his actors shuffle through their endless scenes with a dour sense of purpose, reciting never-ending monologues in languorous, grating close-up monotones. (Even that sprightly rebel Dustin Hoffman speaks so slowly here, you wonder if he finally got that prescription for Thorazine he’s always so desperately needed.)

Ferrell gives one of those unfortunate performances in which you can watch a natural comedian strangling all of his instincts to play things as dull and straight as humanly possible. As Ferrell’s instincts are typically terrible, this should be cause for celebration. But alas, he’s also offering nothing else in return—the center of the film is an asphyxiated empty vessel. He’s not Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine, tamping the shtick down to a point where he’s able to show us emotions we never thought he had in him. Ferrell is Jim Carrey in The Majestic, tamping the shtick down until there’s nothing left.

Stranger Than Fiction pretends to go after all sorts of questions about artists’ dysfunctional relationships with their own creations. You initially assume it might tackle some of the more insidious, parasitic notions Adaptation exploded with such subversive wit and humor. Unfortunately the movie ends up as banal, sappy and simple-minded as any Adam Sandler vehicle—throwing out all the structural gambits and insisting in the end that we, the audience, sit down and enjoy eating sugar cookies once in a while.

Yes, it’s just another hypocritical greeting card, “Stop and smell the roses” sermon from Hollywood (opening the same day as A Good Year, no less). The arch direction and self-regard of Stranger Than Fiction feign at being something smarter and more interesting, and meanwhile the real brains will be busy across the cineplex hall, watching that naked wrestling scene from Borat, again.

Say what you will, that moment feels honest and earned in ways this picture can’t even imagine.

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