Review: Stranger Than Fiction (2006)
I’ve enjoyed Will Ferrell over the last several years in comedies such as Old School, Elf and (especially) Anchorman, but I think, like Jack Black (who intially interested me in High Fidelity and School of Rock) it’s time to maybe call it quits. It’s not you, its me. Ferrell is a likeable performer, and he has that thing important to a comic star in that you root for him even when he’s making a total horse’s ass out of himself, but that’s it. There’s no inner anything going on. It’s (more and more sporadically these days) funny, but it’s shallow, and nothing sticks. He doesn’t have that tightly coiled inner self loathing that seems to turn certain comics into wonderful actors (with the right director Robin Williams has it, and so does Jim Carrey, and so did John Candy).
And this is going to be a problem for Ferrell as he tries to do the “serious actor” bit, and it really hurts in “Stranger than Fiction”, a light, barely there to begin with Charlie Kauffmanish thingamagoo about a man, Harold Crick (sigh, played by Ferrell) who begins to hear his life narrated back to him by a successful Brtish writer (Emma Thompson), who’s planning on killing him at the end of the book (she’s known for tragedies.) The film never establishes its rules, (is Ferrell a fictional character? if so how does he talk to everyone else? Are they fiction?) so we never really understand what’s at stake. I champion ambiguity in movies, but this seems more of a case of writer laziness than any inherent dramatic necessity. Dustin Hoffman and Maggie Gyllenhaal add some life, but it’s not enough. It could have been cunning to cast Will Ferrell as a lost cipher (the sort of personality inside out that worked so well for Sandler in Punchdrunk Love), but the film doesn’t know what to do with that idea.
-Bowen
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