I liked Adaptation and thought I would have liked Stranger Than Fiction more than I did.
Will Ferrell is O.K. as an anal IRS agent who realizes he’s a doomed character in a novel being written by a frazzled and pasty Emma Thompson. Her narrative voiceovers, heard only by Ferrell and the film’s audience, run too long for a device that isn’t that funny to begin with. To drive home the metafiction, computer-generated graphics occasionally pop-up and hover superimposed over the action to show, for example, the steps Ferrell counts to his bus stop and the number of strokes he makes when brushing his teeth.
If you’re expecting Ferrell to act like he does in any of his other movies to date, you’ll be disappointed here with a Serious Role that he doesn’t make his own. Someone more well-versed in traditional romantic comedies like Tom Hanks or even Adam Sandler could have been substituted with little difference. And like Jim Carrey circa The Truman Show, Ferrell has added baggage in an audience expecting him to be funny when he’s performing his Serious Role. Trouble is brewing when a movie starring Will Ferrell expects to generate more laughs from costars such as Emma Thompson
His love interest, introduced in perhaps the first-ever Meet Cute during a tax audit, is played by Maggie Gyllenhaal as a sweet firebrand who owns and runs a hipster bakery/coffehouse. I am moved by law to refer to her as “impish” and add her to my often-shifting list of Top-Three Hottest Lady Actors1.
He woos her with his dopey seriousness and love of her fresh-baked cookies, but what seals the deal is his heartfelt serenade with Wreckless Eric’s song “Whole Wide World”, which he plays for her on her acoustic guitar. She’s so moved, she jumps him right there on the couch for a vigorous makeout session, without even pausing to think that there is no way an anal IRS agent would have ever picked Wreckless Eric’s “Whole Wide World” as the first and only song he learns to play on guitar, despite the fact it’s a brilliant two-cord whiff of punk/new-wave magic.
The whole reason he takes up guitar is because Dustin Hoffman, a natty community college prof just like the one Robin Williams played in Good Will Hunting, inspires him to change the direction of his stale life and foil his untimely demise with a bit of the old carpe diem and carpe puella. That all works brilliantly for characters in movies with messages shopworn as these.
1 Naomi Watts and Kate Winslet, because I know you were wondering. [back]