The film revolves around the boring life of a man named Harold Crick. But one day this changes when Harold begins to hear a writer inside his head tell his life. The narrator is extraordinarily careful, and Harold realizes the sound as a respectable author who watched it on television. But when the narrative reveals that he will die, Harold must find the storyteller to persuade her to change the end of the story before it is too late.
Intriguing possibilities, except Helm and Forster aren't quite Kaufman and Jonze. Once their parallel narratives converge, those hoping for a mind-bending meta-pile-up may feel the movie lacks the courage of its fatalistic fiction.
Time Out
February 03, 2007
An uncommonly plastic bit of Hallmark sentiment-mongering, with exactly the kind of New Age psychobabble ending youâ(TM)d expect.
Inventively inverting "Adaptation.'s'" anxiety into light romance, "Fiction" is one of the most intelligent, lively, charming and beguiling concept comedies since "Groundhog Day" and a perfect seriocomic splinter of Will Ferrell's big-baby shtick.
It doesn't coast on its premise but follows where it leads, which is into some serious territory. What might have been a joke with a tagged-on sentimental ending becomes instead a sensitive movie that affirms the value of life.
Touching dramedy is heavy; won't interest most kids.
Toronto Star
November 10, 2006
Stranger Than Fiction seems like an old episode of the Twilight Zone, and the idea would have worked better as one of Rod Serling's half-hour epistles on human foibles.
"It's not the best piece of English literature of the last ten years," Dustin Hoffman says of Emma Thompson's newest novel, "but it's not bad." That just about sums up Stranger Than Fiction, too.
The actors and the filmmakers all take a more restrained approach than you might expect, keeping the humor gentle, and the jokes mostly as literary as the premise.
