Behind the Ironic Column

I can’t remember ever before seeing a movie that discussed dramatic irony and literary themes and was laugh-out-loud funny as well.  “Stranger than Fiction” covers all of those bases and throws in a few shades of understanding regarding the stress of writer’s block.  Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is proceeding with his meticulously organized and regimented life when he starts hearing someone narrating his life as it takes place.  He’s become a character in a novel – with the voice describing events as they happen but  “accurately and with a better vocabulary.”   The narrator is Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson) who is struggling with writer’s block and trying to figure out a way to kill her character. 

Harold knows he isn’t crazy even though the “voice” distracts him from his work as an IRS agent and causes him to respond to its comments while waiting at bus stops – making other people move nervously away from him.  He ends up consulting an English professor (Dustin Hoffman) who understands literary theory and agrees to help Harold figure out what kind of story he’s in.  He initially did not want to be involved – until Harold quotes one of the narrator’s statements beginning “little did he know…”.   The professor is something of an expert on dramatic irony and is intrigued by this evidence that Harold really is inside a novel. 

At least partly because he’s hearing the running narration in his head, Harold becomes involved with a baker he’s auditing.  Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is interested in making the world a better place and not interested in paying all her taxes. Would the original Harold have had fantasies about her if the narrator weren’t talking about his having them?  We don’t know that. We don’t know how much Harold controls his world and his interactions with other people and how much the narrator controls them with her novel.  Because she has this severe case of writer’s block, she doesn’t write very quickly – so there are hours of every day when Harold is “on his own” but she begins again the next day. When she  surprises him with a  comment about his imminent death, Harold tries to figure out how to stop her from writing him out of existence. 

The actors treat this somewhat fanciful material seriously – there’s no joking or mugging for the camera which is part of what makes it so funny.  The other part is that many of us have had days when our lives seemed to be part of some giant story that we didn’t fully understand.  We could be just narration – do we control what happens in our lives or does the narrator – and can the narration be changed.  The movie doesn’t attempt to answer these questions or explain exactly how Harold came to be in this novel, but it doesn’t need to.  It’s a sweet and clever film – well worth seeing.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS