Stranger Than Fiction

This is a movie I’ve wanted to see for a while now. I have to admit, I’m not a big Will Ferrell fan, but I heard this movie was really good so I figured I could endure him for one performance. I’m so glad I did.

Stranger Than Fiction is about a very dull man named Harold Crick who starts hearing a woman’s voice narrating his life. And through this narration he learns that his life is quickly drawing to an end. We watch as a very confused Harold tries desperately to figure out what is going on while rather dissolved author Karen Eiffel tries to figure out how to off him.

Harold Crick is a fabulous character. He’s incredibly simple for someone with such a complex mind. He goes to work, he files papers, he goes home and he goes to bed day after day after day until the voice starts. He counts the strokes of his toothbrush and the steps to the bus and multiplies large numbers in his head in seconds. All in all, he’s a pretty dull person. And that’s part of his charm. He’s so socially awkward it’s adorable. It’s incredibly amusing to watch him try flirt with his love interest and say things like “I want you” over and over for lack of any better reason to be there. He’s cute when he finally loosens up. He’s extremely polite to everyone and can even be intentionally funny when he wants to be. Over all he’s one of my favorite fictional characters, which is really saying something considering he’s not in a fantasy movie.

Karen Eiffel on the other hand is a creatively blocked fiction writer whose social skills suffer from too much time spent at her typewriter. We watch her die several times as she tries to figure out the best way to kill of Harold Crick. While these parts aren’t particularly amusing, the way she goes about imagining them rather is. She goes around a hospital at one point asking if she could see the people who are dying. I feel bad for her assistant Penny who gets dragged along with her as she searches for inspiration.

While I enjoyed the story, there is one thing that I was constantly wondering about. What story was Karen Eiffel writing? I mean she didn’t know Harold could hear her narration, and I’m pretty sure her story wasn’t about a man hearing narration in his head. So in her story, why does he go through his change? What story is she writing? She also says at the end that she’s going to go back and fix it, but if what she wrote is essentially Harold’s life. So how does that work? I’m probably grossly over thinking the whole thing but it kind of bugged me.

But overall it was a good movie and I really enjoyed it. It had a lot of really touching parts and a very cute romance in there as well. Until next week. ~