Rating of
2/4
"Stranger Than Fiction" by Yojimbo
Yojimbo - wrote on 01/27/12
IRS auditor Harold Crick discovers that he is the leading character of a novel in progress written by an author who is famous for killing off her heroes. I was quite taken with the idea behind this film; enough for me to get past the presence of Will Ferrell, an actor I detest. The beginning of the film lived up to my leap of faith, presenting what seemed to be a clever, literary story in the vein of Charlie Kaufman's work, complete with some nice Eternal Sunshine-style visual flourishes. Unfortunately it falters halfway through as the rather appealing Maggie Gyllenhaal's anti-establishment hippy baker falls into bed with the anally retentive-to-the-point-of-Assberger's Ferrell, a man she previously loathed and represents everything about modern society she hates. Just because he gave her some flour and sang a song. In other words, it becomes the usual kind of absurdly contrived feelgood romcom that I avoid like the plague. It continues the surreal element of the story in that the written word become reality, but it's never explained or even explored, preferring a glib happy ending; any film that describes its own plot as a modern masterpiece needs to do a hell of a lot better than that. The one revelation about this film is the fact that I find Ferrell a lot funnier when he's not TRYING to be funny and hope he continues in this vein in the future. I may actually start to like him. Perish the thought...
