Stranger Than Fiction

From the desk of The Movie Snob

Stranger Than Fiction (B-). This new Will Ferrell movie may look like a comedy from the trailers, but it really isn't -- it's more of a morality tale. Ferrell plays Harold Crick, a polite, soft-spoken, mildly obsessive-compulsive IRS agent whose apartment is even more sparsely furnished than my house. His completely routinized existence is suddenly upended when he begins to hear a woman's voice simultaneously and accurately narrating his life as he is living it. The voice belongs to Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson), a novelist living in the same city and plagued with writer's block as she tries to write a novel about Harold Crick, a polite, soft-spoken, mildly obsessive-compulsive IRS agent. She has no idea that Crick is a real person, and Crick becomes more than a little upset when he hears the voice toss off the observation that his death is imminent. He spends the rest of the movie (a) trying to find the mysterious narrator so he can talk her out of killing him and (b) trying to make something of the potentially very short remainder of his life. Maggie Gyllenhaal (Secretary, Mona Lise Smile) does a nice job as a free-spirited bakery owner that Crick first audits, then romances; Dustin Hoffman (The Graduate, Ishtar) plays a literature professor that Crick consults to help him in his quest. More interesting than entertaining.