If reclusive novelist Karen Eiffel’s cigarettes were to tattle on her, what might they say?
Played with wounded-animal insight by Emma Thompson, Eiffel sucks the butts down, spits into a tissue, then wraps them and puts them away. Her cigs might say that this nerve-jangled writer of books in which she ends her hero’s life is not a litterbug.
Only in director Marc Forster’s magnanimous delight, “Stranger Than Fiction,” Eiffel is not a character. She’s an author coming to the end of her long-delayed novel in which IRS auditor Harold Crick dies.
Will Ferrell delivers a moving and surprisingly
delicate – though not so surprisingly funny – turn as the lonesome bureaucrat bedeviled by a voice only he hears.
In screenwriter Zach Helm’s marvelous debut, objects are aware. They can be our allies. They bear witness. They might even alter our fates. And it is Harold’s wristwatch, says Eiffel with her plush, persistent narration, that “changed everything…” .
When Harold hears about his imminent demise, he goes from flummoxed to frightened to desperate. If you don’t love this anquished soul as he demolishes his monk’s cell of an apartment after hearing Eiffel read his death sentence, then your ticker is as paltry as the Grinch’s.
As characters facing their end often do in literature – and “Stranger Than Fiction” is literary in a vital way – Harold starts to embrace living.
Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Ana Pascal. The tattooed, defiant owner of a succesful bakery, she’s the subject of Harold’s audit and then his affections.
This being a fable about stories and our place in them, he also seeks out his maker to ask why he must die and to plead for mercy.
His author is fairly busy with dilemmas of her own. Eiffel’s publishers have sent in a closer of sorts: an assistant named Penny Escher (Queen Latifah). The two can be found in inclement weather and other awkward situations with Penny looking on doubtfully. Eiffel wears a frozen grimace as she imagines ways to off Harold. A blond boy and a black woman figure into each scenario. But in an act of omnipotent empathy, she takes his place in those death scenes.
Forster directed the edgy “Monster’s Ball” and the enchanting “Neverland.” Here he deftly wraps his arms around play and heartache in a loving embrace.
Visual wit abounds. Graphics dance across the screen as Eiffel’s narration recounts Harold’s toothbrush strokes, his steps from his apartment to the bus stop and so forth. Zest snuggles up to melancholy. Britt Daniel and Brian Reitzell’s evocative music adds to the dance of tragedy and comedy.
Sadness turns into deft humor then circles back to the bittersweet.
Ferrell’s face is remarkable at registering Harold’s plaintive awareness of his predicament. Harold’s pragmatic nature sends him in search of a resolution. It’s his matter-of-fact clarity that makes the scenes between him and a psychiatrist (Linda Hunt) and a touchy-feely workplace therapist (Tom Hulce) so darn amusing. His certainty trumps their theories and interventions. He finally lands at Jules Hilbert’s university doorstep. Surely the narrative theorist, played by Dustin Hoffman, will know who is writing the story and what her aim might be.
Hoffman’s “little did he know” riff is pitch-perfect verbal slapstick and a deliciously spot-on depiction of the natterings of some professors.
Pascal. Escher. Eiffel. Math geeks will recognize a pattern: Everything in this film unfolds to deliver an elegant existential construct.
With its twists and meta-turns, “Stranger Than Fiction” conjures images of “Adaptation” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” the mind- bending pleasures of writer Charlie Kaufman. Forster is less flashy and just as gifted as Kaufman’s directors have been.
This PG-13 film is well-wrought – not overwrought – a heartfelt gift offered to the broadest possible audience.
There are, of course, a number of ways to understand this meeting of creator and creation. To borrow Joan Osborne’s lyrical conceit, “Stranger Than Fiction” imagines what might happen if god were one of us, just a pajama- clad slob struggling like Karen Eiffel.
Toward the conclusion of this magically thoughtful film, Ana Pascal utters a wincingly clumsy line. In a film of impressive verbal acuity, the line is striking for its tinniness.
I won’t divulge that bit of dialog, but know this: “Stranger Than Fiction” is so finely tuned that the clunker is yet another one of the movie’s many arguments for grace found in the ordinary.
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com.
“Stranger Than Fiction”
PG-13 for some disturbing images, sexuality, brief language and nudity|1 hour, 53 minutes|TRAGICOMEDY|Directed by Marc Forster; written by Zach Helm; photography by Roberto Schaefer; starring Will Ferrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah and Emma Thompson |Opens today at area theaters.
