Review: Stranger Than Fiction
My Little Sister and I have been waiting a long time for this one. Trailers for Stranger Than Fiction have been running for weeks now and every time we saw one, we giggled and nudged each other while one of us said, “We HAVE to see that one!” This past weekend, we did.
The Will Ferrell of Old School and Wedding Crashers is nowhere to be found in Stranger Than Fiction and as much as I loved him in those movies, it’s a bit of a relief. Ferrell’s Harold Crick is low key and amusing, not slap-your-knee funny.
Harold Crick finds himself the central character in a novel. He can hear the narration of his life in his head and he launches a desperate bid to find out who is writing about him after the narrator mention’s Harold’s “imminent death”. The panic of knowing he’s about to die changes Harold’s life in unexpected and mainly wonderful ways. Everyone is terrific in this film: Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson, Queen Latifa, Maggie Gyllenhaal and, of course, Will Ferrell.
Stranger Than Fiction is a movie with a message that is so subtle, you don’t even realize it at the time. The film flows without an obviousness to it. Much later the theme sinks in: we’re all Harold Cricks with our own great narrator. Live your life. Be good to others and do what makes you happy. You won’t be wasting two hours of your life if you see this film.
