Honestly, before I took up this beat I had no idea how many new movies aren’t that great and aren’t truly terrible but are simply so-so and when it comes to so-so Stranger Than Fiction is just so so-so, which is a shame because: a) I’d been looking forward to it and b) I have better things to do with my time, like buy goats for people for Christmas and then figure out how to wrap them.
I’d been looking forward to it not only because the conceit sounded wonderfully neat (it’s about a guy who hears his life being narrated to him) but also because it’s got Emma Thompson in it. I know there’s a piety to her that gets some people’s backs up, but as an actress she can not only strip herself of all vanity in the most exquisite and extraordinary way (Howard’s End, Remains of the Day, Sense and Sensibility) but can also single-handedly almost save a film. Are you telling me that in Love, Actually she wasn’t the only one who remembered to Act, Actually? But, ultimately, neither the conceit nor Emma are sufficiently deployed to save this film from being yet another familiar rom-com of the kind that could star Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Don’t get me wrong, though. I’d love Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan films if only they weren’t so rubbish and I didn’t have better things to do, like wrap six mango striplings and an eye operation.
In this film, Will Ferrell plays Harold Crick, a solitary, miserable shell of an IRS agent who lives a rigidly ordered life: gets up at the same time; counts the strokes as he brushes his teeth; counts his steps to the bus stop; takes the same bus every day …and then, one morning, he hears a female voice in his head and it’s as if an author is in there narrating his life.
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