Nevertheless, in order to figure out whether his story will be comic or tragic, Harold acts on his attraction to Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a passionate tax-protesting baker under audit. In order for Ana to embody Harold's liberation, the script makes her unpleasantly confrontational about her refusal to pay the portion of her taxes she deems will be spent on the defense budget. (Swing-sets are okay, but not tanks.) If Helm thinks she represents Thoreau's concept of civil disobedience, he should reread the 1849 essay and point out any part where Thoreau exhorts you to ream out the representative of the state who comes to enforce the law you object to, as Ana does here. (Gandhi's 1930 instructions to those involved with him in the satyagraha movement of nonviolent resistance included the admonition that a civil resister "will … never retaliate. Retaliation includes swearing and cursing.")
Ana's tax protest does resemble Thoreau's to a limited extent. He refused to pay the poll tax but writes, "I have never declined paying the highway tax, because I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject." Of course, he refused to pay certain state taxes when they were separately assessed, but more importantly, he rose far above the mundane context of his protest. He wrote, for instance:
I have paid no poll tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up…. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.… I could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was dangerous.My reviews of Happy Endings (2005) and The Great New Wonderful (2006) prove that I sit in the front row of the Maggie Gyllenhaal fan bus. The problem here, however, is that as daring as she has been playing emotionally self-enclosed women, as Ana she's just annoying. Which is made worse by the fact that the movie treats her uncivil disobedience as if it were heroic and even endearing. Later Ana calms down, and Gyllenhaal relaxes into her most pliable mood, the least saccharine winsomeness in movies (seen to best effect so far in Mona Lisa Smile [2003]), but by then it's too late.
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