Most big action movies bore me. I don't know what walloping heroic romances like Mission: Impossible III, Superman Returns, Miami Vice, and Casino Royale could even potentially offer me. A more emotional James Bond?! As if (1) seeing 007 movies were unavoidable and so I must care whether James Bond's range is broader or narrower, (2) heroic romance were a suitable narrative genre for conveying emotion, and (3) I had no other source for representations of emotion.
I turn to smaller-scaled movies for something beyond what these super-sized video games are programmed for. Yet it's rare that I hate a blockbuster as much as I hated Stranger Than Fiction, or Little Miss Sunshine, which was a close number two as my least favorite movie of the year. But I hated Little Miss Sunshine only from the ice cream scene onwards, whereas I hated Stranger Than Fiction right from the start, when the voice-over narrator implies that the protagonist Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) leads a miserable life because he's an IRS auditor and thinks in terms of numbers. Much of what follows may seem like nitpicking, but when a script is this nit-witted there are only nits to be picked from it.
The high concept of the movie is that Harold's life is both real and a narrative being written by Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson), a great novelist who hasn't finished a book in a decade. Harold's constricted life starts to loosen up after he begins to hear Kay's narration (she speaks as she types). When Kay says/writes that her character Harold is about to die, the unnerved real-life Harold consults first a shrink and then the literature professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman) in desperation. Professor Hilbert tells him that the first thing is to determine whether his story is a comedy or a tragedy, i.e., whether he will live or die at the end of the story. It's highly possible these days that a literature professor wouldn't know that comedy and tragedy are genres of drama not prose fiction, but I don't think the movie is intended as satire of academe.
What this does tell you, however, is that screenwriter Zach Helm's "cleverness" far outruns his familiarity with his chosen subject matter. Despite Professor Hilbert's reverence for Kay Eiffel's output, what we hear of her latest book is clearly not the masterpiece Professor Hilbert claims it to be after reading the manuscript. Kay's narration made me wince even more than Woody Allen's misuse of the term "deconstruction" in Deconstructing Harry (1997) and the selections from the "great" books in that movie, which sounded more like premises for comic shorts than accomplished works of fiction on the order of Philip Roth's.
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Article comments
1 - Paul
To quote Thoreau in a movie review is the first sign of over-thinking the film.
To reject its imperfect characters, who only fleetingly espouse such grand philosophies as half-baked is missing the point.
Stranger Than Fiction is smart not because it is academic, high-brow, or philosophical. But because it rejects such concerns in favor of human emotion.
Consider the final conversation between Eiffel and
Hilbert, when he tells her the book is no masterpiece without Harold's death. She responds that because he knows, and accepts it anyway, it is inhuman to allow it to happen. She refuses to sacrifice humanity for art. This movie is a celebration of humanity. It is emotional art that perhaps compromises itself in terms of literary merit, but soars majestically as an example of humanism. The characters are flawed because they must be. If they were better, cleverer, more rational or more well versed in Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, the movie would be a plodding, academic investigation of art and humanity. And that would be worse than not allowing Harold Crick to die.
2 - me
You wouldn't know a good movie if it bit you in the ass.
3 - Dr Dreadful
Do movies often do that? In my experience they more often suck than bite.
4 - God
get over yourself