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Ferrell plays Howard Crick, an IRS auditor who is a candidate to steal Stephen Tobolowsky’s title of “the world’s most boring human” he earned with his character in Sneakers. Crick counts the number of brushstrokes on his teeth, has the same daily routine and goes about work like a computer to the eerie extent of being able to calculate large multiplication tables while visions of the numbers surround his every movement. One morning he begins hearing a British voice who seems to be narrating his every moment, albeit with “a much better vocabulary.” The voice is that of Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson, overcompensating the depressive), a Sylvia Plath-type writer obsessed with death suffering writer’s block on her latest manuscript – whose lead character is Howard Crick.

Howard makes every effort to ignore the voice, but after trying a shrink he finds himself meeting literature professor, Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman), who offers the opportunity to either debunk or understand the voice inside his head. In the film’s most amusing sequence, Hilbert puts Crick through an extensive Q & A designed to process elimination of his place in literary history. “Are you a Gollum,” is just one of the many inquiries by the teach? While he awaits further clues into Crick’s existence, Hilbert advises Howard to turn the tables on his narrator by marching to his own beat and living life to the fullest. This includes mustering up the courage to put the moves on mega-liberal baker, Ana (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who as the latest victim of IRS auditing, is the exact opposite of Crick’s soft-spoken robotics.

This developing relationship is just a fly speck on the problems screenwriter Zach Helm has with this screenplay, but is still indicative of the suspension of disbelief we’re asked to swallow. Simply put, there’s not an ounce of believability in it. Chewing on a manuscript manifesting itself into a flesh-and-blood world goes down smoother than this young, independent ultra-laissez-faire woman would turn on a dime to Crick’s shy and innocent routine which is more likely to be interpreted as odd and creepy. If this is all just point of Eiffel’s story though, wouldn’t Ana also have to be a creation? How would she feel knowing that her strings were being pulled by a novelist celebrated by her literary belittling and elimination of the male species?

As spoiled by the film’s ads (and is admittedly an early twist to the plot), Eiffel intends to kill Crick by the end of her novel, just as she has every main character. (Kinda takes the suspense out of her prose, don’t it?) This presents a potentially fascinating paradox to man’s last days on Earth and it takes precisely the right twist on Hilbert’s final piece of advice to Crick. But its one of the few right things about Stranger Than Fiction and Helm manages to even screw THAT up with such an uninspired resolution that manages to rank not even amongst the top three bits of non-inspiration associated with Crick’s journey. Marc Forster’s direction, no stranger to flights of fancy (Finding Neverland) and obscene camera tricks (Stay) so pronounces his flair for filling the frames early on, but ditches every gimmick in his playbook a half-hour in, letting Helm’s screenplay do the speaking which is akin to allowing a smug author to voice his own audiobook before the book itself is finished.

By the end as the dust is settling and the dots are connecting between fate’s random supporting players, Stranger Than Fiction reaches a sullen magnitude not through its tone but in the audience left with an idea and nothing more. Cut out a page from Charlie Kaufman’s reality bizarros (particularly the brilliant Adaptation) and throw in a whole lot of the wasted initiative of What Women Want and the blender fuses very little thanks to the dull edges of Helm’s script. He has zero fun with his premise and no foresight into the possibilities of Crick’s history, his birth or his future. The world’s most boring human indeed manifested in one of the year’s most lifeless screenplays.

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originally posted: 11/10/06 16:05:55
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