MovieSlam: Kazz's Review Corner: Stranger Than Fiction

(Note that this is filled with spoilers. I don't care about spoiling worthless plots, though, so go ahead and read it if you're not of the delusion that this movie is worth seeing for yourself.)

I like movies that fuck with reality. Fight Club did it. Donnie Darko did it. Charlie Kaufman does it by accident in his sleep. I think it's cool to break the way the world works. It's fun, and the movies that do it tend to be really interesting, no matter how stupid the plot ends up being.

So how is it that a movie that breaks reality ends up being worse for the fact? How did I go to a movie that shatters reality as a matter of course and end up wishing to God that, by the end, they'd reveal that it was all a dream? Why do I have to be put in a position to wish for the biggest cop-out ending of all time, out of the honest feeling that it would help? What sort of movie fucks its own premise up so badly that I wanted it to fix reality?

Stranger Than Fiction is the story of a lonely, socially-awkward IRS agent named Harold Crick. After an opening scene featuring way more CGI than ever belonged in a Will Ferrell movie, he suddenly and inexplicably begins to hear a female Brit narrating his life. She accurately depicts his every action, and perfectly predicts the future. So, naturally, Harold is mildly concerned when she reveals that the re-setting of his watch will be the event that leads to his tragic death. Of course, we saw that much in the trailer.

So, Harold spends the better part of the movie screaming angrily at the sky, trying to figure out why this voice is following him, how it knows everything, and especially, why he's going to die. He sees a psychiatrist, who says he has schizophrenia, but because he's a retard who doesn't believe completely plausible diagnoses, he runs off to enlist the help of a university literature professor played by Dustin Hoffman. So they go on a cross-country road trip and Harold realizes he loves retards more than money. lol jk. Dustin Hoffman, for no particular reason, completely believes Harold when he says that he's a character in someone else's book, and once he learns that Harold believes he's going to die, he gives him the best advice I've ever heard in the history of the world: "Everybody dies. Deal with it."

So Harold has a brief and implausible romance with a punked-out slut baker named Ana (played half-convincingly by Maggie Gyllenhaal) whom he was unsuccessfully auditing in the beginning of the film, and learns to play guitar, and suddenly cures himself of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and all sorts of other cool stuff. He's learned that life is fantastic. Great. Let's look at another piece of the film.

While all of the action with Harold is going on, we see the author of his book, played by Emma Thompson, trying desperately to figure out how to kill him (although we know from the beginning that it has something to do with his wristwatch, she doesn't seem to figure that out until halfway through the fucking end). To help her in this effort is, Of All Fucking People, Queen God-Damned Latifah. Thankfully, she doesn't actually DO anything in this movie besides give Emma someone to speak out loud to. So, the picture we get is that Emma is writing this book which evidently controls reality.

Long story short, Harold figures out who the author is with Dustin Hoffman's help. So he digs up her IRS records to figure out her phone number and then he goes to call her. We switch perspectives to Emma typing on her typewriter, the words, "The phone rang." And suddenly, her phone rings. She types, "The phone rang again." The phone rings again. "The phone rang a third time." The phone rings a third time. She answers her phone, and it's Harold Crick, her main character.

So at this point, those of us with at least a casual acquaintance with the foundations of logic believe we have figured things out, and even though reality is clearly somewhat twisted in this film to begin with, a few rules of this fantasy universe seem clear: Emma controls reality with her typewriter. Whatever she types seems to occur somewhat immediately. She struggles with this very fact in one scene, after she meets Harold Crick, in which she is lying on a table, lamenting at the thought that she has actually been killing real people by killing the characters of her previous books. So, although we're never able to read the book itself, we logically follow that everything she's written in the book has actually occurred. Right?

So, therefore, we logical people say, the book must be about a person who hears narration of his life, runs around attempting to discover the author, and then does. Right?

Evidently fucking not. She seems ignorant of the fact that he's been running around trying to find the author of his story. She also seems ignorant of the fact that he has been meeting with a literature professor for that very reason. How is this fucking possible, we ask? She was writing the words, "The phone rang." And HER phone rang. So, she must have been writing about how Harold Crick was calling HER, THE AUTHOR, right? If not, who was he calling in the book? What was she writing? We never find out.

You can't have a movie in which one character is revealed to have a magic typewriter that controls reality and then be selective about what actually made it into reality and what was just happenstance. Emma was also writing the romantic plot about Harold and Maggie Gyllenhaal, so did she create Maggie's character herself as well? Did these people appear as soon as Emma thought of them? She narrates several scenes where Harold is talking to people at the office, so did she make up the entire fucking IRS? Perhaps it works the other way around; Emma is unaware of her incredible psychic ability to predict what's happening and what's going to happen, and she just thinks she's actually making it up, whereas she's just recording reality without her knowledge. Of course. It all makes goddamn sense now. Except that she still didn't know that Harold motherfucking spent half the movie looking for her, but I guess we can just overlook that bit.

Anyway, after meeting Harold Crick, she lets him read the book, including the final bit about his death (which was written on a legal pad, not typed, so I guess that means it doesn't happen yet in crazy loopy beat-off-on-my-face-land). He shows it to Dustin Hoffman, who really likes the book, and decides that, and I'm not fucking making this up, that Harold should die for the sake of the book's quality. "No other ending would work," he states. "You have to die." Even more inexplicably, Harold agrees. He goes through the paces, exactly as described in the book, completely aware of why and how he's going to die, totally fucking unconcerned.

Then Emma changes the ending at the last second and he lives. The end.

This movie blows. If you're going to break reality, follow your own fucking rules. This was an SNL skit premise blown up into a 90 minute travesty.