Stranger Than Fiction has a self-regard that can grate, but Ferrell and Thompson give winning performances that suggest the film's aim is true.
Stranger Than Fiction (2006)
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Reviews Counted:165
Fresh:119
Rotten:46
Average Rating:6.8/10
Consensus: A fun, whimsical tale about about an office drone trying to save his life from his narrator. The cast obviously is having a blast with the script, but Stranger Than Fiction's tidy lessons make this metaphysical movie feel like Charlie Kaufman-lite.
Rated: 12A [See Full Rating] for some disturbing images, sexuality, brief language and nudity.
Runtime: 1 hr 53 mins
Genre: Comedies
Theatrical Release:01-12-2006
Synopsis: One morning, a seemingly average and generally solitary IRS agent named Harold Crick begins to hear a female voice narrating his every action, thought and feeling in alarmingly precise detail.... One morning, a seemingly average and generally solitary IRS agent named Harold Crick begins to hear a female voice narrating his every action, thought and feeling in alarmingly precise detail. Harold's carefully controlled life is turned upside down by this narration only he can hear, and when the voice declares that Harold Crick is facing imminent death, he realizes he must find out who is writing his story and persuade her to change the ending. The voice in Harold's head turns out to be the once celebrated, but now nearly forgotten, novelist Karen "Kay" Eiffel (Emma Thompson), who is struggling to find an ending for what might be her best book. Her only remaining challenge is to figure out a way to kill her main character, but little does she know that Harold Crick is alive and well and inexplicably aware of her words and her plans for him. To make matters worse, Kay's publisher has dispatched a hard-nosed "assistant," Penny Escher (Queen Latifah), to force Kay to finish her novel and finish off Harold Crick. Desperate to take control of his destiny and avoid an untimely demise, Harold seeks help from a literary theorist named Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman), who suggests that Harold might be able to change his fate by turning his story from a tragedy into a comedy. Professor Hilbert suggests that Harold try to follow one of comedy's most elemental formulas: a love story between two people who hate each other. His suggestion leads Harold to initiate an unlikely romance with a free-spirited baker named Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal). As Harold experiences true love and true life for the first time, he becomes convinced that he has escaped his fate, as his story seems to be taking on all the trappings of a comedy in which he will not, and cannot, die. But Harold is unaware that in a Karen Eiffel tragedy, the lead characters always die at exactly the moment when they have the most to live for. Harold and Kay find themselves in unexplored territory as each must weigh the value of a single human existence against what might just be an immortal work of art: a novel about life and death -- and taxes. --© Sony Pictures [More]
Starring: Will Ferrell, Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman
Starring: Will Ferrell, Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Tony Hale, Queen Latifah, Kristin Chenoweth
Director: Marc Forster
Director: Marc Forster
Producer: Lindsay Doran, Aubrey Henderson, Jim Miller, Brittany Daniel
Studio: Sony Pictures Entertainment
Reviews for Stranger Than Fiction
An uncommonly plastic bit of Hallmark sentiment-mongering, with exactly the kind of New Age psychobabble ending you’d expect.
Ferrell rules in this film. I take back my words of prejudice. This is the smartest film in town.
It's a shame that Stranger Than Fiction doesn't quite sustain its premise, but it's so entertaining that you might not even notice.
Consegue desenvolver sua história de forma sempre interessante e com uma sensibilidade que certamente surpreenderá aqueles que forem ao cinema esperando assistir a uma comédia (algo que este longa não é).
When it flies, it soars. But it develops leaden feet as it spins over into a convoluted, overly long wind down. This is an intelligent, engaging film that gets it right, for the most part, before ultimately capitulating to the demands of Hollywood.
Ferrell breaks the mold in this pleasantly surprising, terrific film.
Stranger than Fiction is more high-concept than high-brow; a comedy heavy on gimmick that falls a little short of cunning.
Never really makes sense of its metafictional conceit, but at least Marc Foster refuses to accept the current Hollywood conventional wisdom that movie comedies should be as visually bland as TV sitcoms.
Stranger Than Fiction is not clever enough to reach Adaptation's upscale audiences or funny or entertaining enough for more mass consumption.
It may not be a masterpiece like [the writer's] new novel, but it's an entertaining story.
for all its faults, it blazes new trails in mixing popular entertainment and philosophy, not to mention metaphysics, with enough panache to make it all seem eminently sensible.
The movie's vigorous efforts to channel Charlie Kaufman and Andrew Niccol, leave it looking rather familiar, not strange at all.
In many ways, Harold does not come across as a real character. He is more of a conceit than anything, defined entirely by quirky character traits, rather than simple humanity.
An amusing little quirky vehicle that not only entertains, but actually contains a few thought provoking scenes.
Unlike the brainier Kaufman stories, it's easy to understand how matters are proceeding here without an air of pretentiousness.
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