Stranger Than Fiction

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment / 2006 / 113 Minutes / PG-13
Street Date: February 27, 2007

As you can well imagine, I get to watch a huge variety of films, on average about 150 each year. Those of you who are familiar with my occasional rants know that I seem to be very sensitive to poor writing. I deplore scripts that are illogical or insult your intelligence; I admire screenplays that are as creative or unpredictable as they are entertaining. Finding such a movie is one of my greatest filmic pleasures, and I’m pleased to include Stranger Than Fiction within that engaging group. Screenwriter Zack Helm has fashioned a deceptively simple and very clever premise and authored a script that both amuses and keeps the audience slightly off balance.

Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is an IRS auditor with quirks. He’s compulsive, anal-retentive, a mathematical savant, and very lonely. He resides in an immaculately maintained apartment in Chicago; he has a place for everything and everything is in its place. His mind is constantly distracted by the quantitative. He counts the number of strokes of his toothbrush as he cleans each tooth. He mentally measures distances and volumes. He’s obsessed with remaining on a strict routine dictated by his impressive watch. His life is so well ordered that he’s not living his life.

That changes with the sudden and disconcerting intrusion of a narrator. Hers is a disembodied voice that only he can hear, and as he goes through the routine of his day, her articulate descriptions of his every action ring in his head. There is a perfectly good reason for the superior vocabulary and erudite expressiveness of his narrator; she’s best-selling author Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson).

Crick attempts to function. He visits an attractive and belligerent baker, Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal), for an audit. He tries to maintain his routine. But the voice becomes more and more troublesome. He seeks the council of an IRS staffer, Dr. Cayly (Tom Hulce in a rare appearance; he hasn’t been seen on the big screen since 1995’s Wings of Courage); alas, Cayly can only offer the suggestion of a vacation and a hug. He sees psychiatrist Dr. Mittag-Leffler (Linda Hunt), who understandably believes that he’s suffering from schizophrenia; with an expression of great concern, she recommends pharmaceuticals. But Crick is convinced that his problem is quite something else and in an inspired move seeks out Professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman), a prominent educator of literature. And after an initial reaction of extreme skepticism, Hilbert decides to help.

They accept the assumption that an author is narrating his life, so Crick must find the writer. That becomes somewhat urgent when the author declares that his death is imminent. Fortunately for Crick, the author has a serious block. Her works are known for killing off her heroes, but she cannot conceive of a satisfyingly lethal end for her latest character. In fact, her publisher is so concerned that Penny Escher (Queen Latifah) is sent along to act as a facilitator. Eiffel’s block will afford Crick the opportunity to transform, discover that life is more than his narrowly quantitative perceptions, and find love before the end of Eiffel’s last chapter.

The filmmakers have cunningly integrated graphics into the images to represent Crick’s analytical mind at work. It’s a clever way to almost instantaneously project his state of mind and the compulsive distractions that consume his life. Crick is a substantial departure for Will Ferrell; this is his most subtle performance since Melinda and Melinda. His portrayal of Crick projects a range of emotion that I don’t remember seeing from him before, not typical Ferrell silliness, but a genuine comedic and dramatic performance. The reliable Maggie Gyllenhaal is a believably disenchanted taxpayer who is being audited because she withheld that percentage of her taxes she felt were being used to fund programs of which she disapproves. Dustin Hoffman’s Hilbert is a wonderfully quirky intellect that guides Crick through the challenges of trying to understand the literary connections to his problem. Queen Latifah’s Escher is a great foil to Emma Thompson’s Kay Eiffel. And Thompson very nearly steals the film with her dry wit, desperate frustration, and ultimate strength.

Director Marc Forster does an admirable job. I particularly like the ways in which he deceives the audience with sequences that are in the mind rather than in reality. And he delights in disorienting the viewer. Consider a conversation between Crick and Pascal on an articulated bus. Crick sits in a seat cantilevered into the flexible joint between the front and the back of the extended bus. So as the bus turns, he and his seat rotate. To keep him in the center of the screen, locked in Pascal’s point-of-view, the entire bus seem to rotate around him, a simple, creative choice to disorient. Stranger Than Fiction is a funny, touching, smart film that I thoroughly enjoyed.

The Video: How Does The Disc Look?

The film’s theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1 is presented in a very fine high definition transfer. I’m running out of ways to express my utter delight in watching a film conveyed with such accuracy and detail to my home theater. White is an important color in this film. The IRS records room and Eiffel’s apartment occupy the top five to ten percent of the video dynamic range with many subtle variations and gradients that could have been all too easily lost in the white crush of a sloppy transfer. Not here. All the subtleties are present. Skin tones are very natural. The organic environment of Pascal’s apartment contrasts wonderfully with the sterility of Crick’s. Primary colors are vivid without being exaggerated. Nighttime scenes offer deep inky blacks and very fine shadow detail. Small object detail in the form of highly readable small text and facial expressions in medium to long shots is exemplary. Finely grained textures of fabrics and Pascal’s baked goods are nicely conveyed. The transfer print is immaculate. This is simply another transfer that doesn’t call attention to itself; it simply reproduces the motion picture theater experience.

The Audio: How Does The Disc Sound?

The PCM 5.1 track is just as effective with a wonderful sense of transparency. The spoken voice has a very natural timbre, warm and with a culpable presence. Britt Daniel and Brian Reitzell composed an idiosyncratic score that suits the film perfectly; the music is recorded dryly and with satisfying fidelity. The surround channels are active to establish ambiance and the occasional discrete effect. They are used even more for the score. Sound effects are convincing, but don’t draw attention to themselves; they simply serve the onscreen action. The bottom end of the spectrum does not impress, yet it’s totally appropriate, like the sound of a bus engine, or a car hitting the water, or a bodily impact.

There are also Dolby Digital 5.1 tracks in English and French. Optional subtitles are available in English, English SDH, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, and Thai.

Supplements: What Goodies Are There?

We begin with a collection of non-anamorphic widescreen featurettes that are both letterboxed and windowpaned onscreen, leaving a large black border totally around the video images. The extras are supported by Korean subtitles, an interesting choice.

In the Actors In Search Of A Story featurette (18:37), director Marc Forster takes the lead in a discussion of how and why each principal cast member was brought into the show. Although there is a great deal of mutual backslapping, the featurette does offer some insights concerning the nature of matching performers with roles. And some of the performers offer insights and quips that make this a worthwhile short.

The Building The Team featurette (8:32) gives producer Lindsay Doran the opportunity to put the spotlight on the behind-the-scenes specialists who are so essential to the production. Covered most thoroughly is director Forster. The principal players offer their thoughts about his style. Also covered are the interactions of the director with his director of photography, production designer, costume designer, writer, producers, editors, and special effects team. Once again we have a blend of backslapping and interesting revelations.

The On Location in Chicago featurette (10:29) traces the selection of Chicago as the film’s location. I’ve always found Chicago to have a very distinctive personality, with unique architecture and the occasional impressive sculpture, so I was surprised to discover that the director preferred the anonymity of the city’s appearance to avoid its intruding on the story. The short manages to cover each of the important locations and describing artistic choices, all in a relatively short block of time.

Words on a Page (9:28) is a featurette that examines of the writing process, the influence of the director and producer, and allows screenwriter Zach Helm the opportunity to describes the evolution of the script and the dramatic decisions made to walk that fine line between comedy and tragedy. Death is the rather heavy subject that dominates the film, so infusing the screenplay with just the right amount of gentle humor was critical to success.

The Picture a Number: The Evolution of a G.U.I. featurette (17:13) is a look at the special effects of the wonderfully imaginative graphic user interface that mirrors Crick’s ordered inner existence. After several of the participants describe the nature of a GUI to the computer illiterate, we learn about the evolution of the effect. We see examples of early efforts that didn’t work well. MK12 ultimately became the CGI GUI major influence. It’s a clever and remarkable effect that affects our perceptions of the character and makes him more accessible and sympathetic.

On The Set (3:00) is a montage of behind-the-scenes snatches and snippets. There is no narration, but there is the occasional recorded voice. We see the production people and cast between shots, mostly having a fine time. The montage also gives the essential but rarely acknowledged minor contributors their three seconds of fame.

There are two Deleted and Extended Scenes. The first is an ad-libbed television interview (6:29) seen briefly in the film on a television in Professor Hilbert’s office. Book Channel interviewer Darlene Sunshine (Kristin Chenoweth) and Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson) talk about the author’s most recently published book. Darlene is delightfully dimwitted and Karen is delightfully droll, thinly veiling her intolerance of fools. The next is another interview (4:56) by the clueless Darlene, this time strictly for background television content.

To complete this group of extras you’ll find a collection of high definition trailers for Marie Antoinette, Casino Royale, Talladega Nights, The Holiday, The Pursuit of Happiness, and a Blu-ray Disc promo.

The 113-minute film is organized into sixteen chapters. (Is it my imagination or do HD discs more often than not have a binary number of chapters, like 16 or 32?)

Final Thoughts

This film is being released day and date with DVD. I don’t care which format you prefer, this is a wonderfully entertaining, amusing, and warm film that is easy to recommend in any resolution. But if you can enjoy the benefits of Blu-ray disc, rest assured that the transfer is first-rate, and the audio track is pleasingly transparent. I suspect the supplements will be quite the same on both types of discs.