I go to see movies for a wide variety of reasons. Stranger Than Fiction holds a great number of them. Here is one of the most satisfying and complete movies to come along in 2006. The film is endlessly entertaining, highly original, and thoroughly enjoyable from beginning to end. For once we have a movie that never once compromises, nor does it falter in dealing with its wonderful premise. I become increasingly excited whenever I realize I love a movie, and with Stranger Than Fiction, I began to feel the tiny hint of excitement mere minutes into the film, and they only built from there. Best of all, that feeling never faded because I felt the film made a grave misstep or a wrong move. Director Mark Forster (Stay, Finding Neverland) and first-time screenwriter Zach Helm never miss a beat as they unravel this completely fascinating fantasy that holds more wonderful ideas than any one movie I have seen since 2004's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Complex, yet completely accessible, Fiction is hands down one of the great films of the year.

Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is an isolated and lonely man who seems to have come to accept the fact that everyone in the world hates him. After all, he has one of the most despised jobs in the world - that of an IRS auditor. He leads a very ordinary, routine and calculated life where he counts everything, from the number of steps it takes to get to his bus stop to get to work, right down to the number of brush strokes he takes when he is brushing his teeth in the morning. Harold's mundane existence becomes much less so when he begins to hear the voice of a woman from somewhere, narrating the events of his life as he lives them. The voice does not seem to know Harold personally, yet somehow seems to know everything about him - even that Harold is going to die sometime soon. The owner of this voice is Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson), a reclusive and chain-smoking author who is currently trying to figure out the ending of her latest novel, "Death and Taxes", about a lonely IRS auditor named Harold Crick, and the events that lead to his demise. Somehow, Harold's existence and the book that Kay is writing have intertwined, and he has an unknown amount of time to live before this writer seals his fate. With the help of a literature professor at a local college (Dustin Hoffman), Harold will attempt to track this woman down, and in the process, learn a lot about himself and his life.

To reveal much more about the premise of Stranger Than Fiction would be criminal, so I will stop there. This is a movie best experienced with as little knowledge as possible, so that you can fully enjoy the way that the screenplay by Zach Helm fits all the pieces together, and how it juggles laughter, heartfelt sentiment, and genuine emotion that never once feels forced or manipulated. This movie is a wonder, from its ingeniously clever premise right down to the wonderful characters and their relationships. Harold Crick himself is one of the best examples of an everyman character that I've seen in a movie in a while. From his early moments as a reclusive man who lives solely by his routine and his wristwatch, to the man he ultimately becomes thanks to his bizarre experiences that drive the plot, he is completely likeable, and most of all, believable. This is one of those movies where you might see a little bit of yourself in either the main character, or one of the ones that surround him. You might smile in recognition, or you might think about yourself in a way you hadn't before. Movies have that kind of power, but so rarely use it. That's why you have to embrace movies like this when they come along. There are many scenes or lines of dialogue that are clever, but not so much so that they come across as being overly so and drag you out of the spell that the movie casts upon its audience. You are enraptured, listening to the dialogue, embracing the performances, and just loving every minute of it.

Sometimes when a movie is built around an original yet implausible premise, it gets too bogged down in explaining itself, or it just doesn't explain itself well enough in order to leave the viewer satisfied. The later is something that happened in Forster's last film, Stay. It was an intriguing puzzle of a movie, but one that I felt almost needed a director's commentary playing over it just so you could figure out exactly what he was trying to say with his story. While Fiction does not even attempt to explain its own key mystery, it does not once feel like a cheat or leave the viewer feeling confused or unfulfilled. The story is told in such a way so that we can believe that the impossible is happening in a way that is probably too great or complex to understand. Why it is happening is not what's important anyway. Rather the movie wisely decides to focus on what is happening, and how the main character deals with this almost miraculous turn of events that changes his life, and the lives of those around him. Look at the way Dustin Hoffman's character is slowly drawn into the story, becoming a bigger player than his early scenes would lead us to believe. Or look at the wonderful relationship that develops between Harold Crick and a feisty baker (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal) who refuses to pay half of her taxes. Rather than over-explaining itself, the movie decides to take us on a journey with these people, and spends time developing them as real people. By focusing on the characters, the movie is able to bring us a number of wonderful scenes, and even make some scenes that seem small (such as a sequence where Harold is looking for a guitar that suits his personality) stand out much more.

The wonderful storytelling featured throughout is aided by a cast that is more than willing to rise up to its challenges. Much like the film itself, the performances do not take a single wrong step. As Harold Crick, Will Ferrell has been given a golden opportunity to play a complex and emotional character, and he tackles the role expertly, demanding our attention the second he walks onto the screen. Ferrell has largely been hit and miss with me in a lot of his past performances, but here, he gets to give a performance that shows a side of him we rarely see. He is subdued and holding back, but still extremely personable. I think this is one of the best "serious" performances I have seen from a comic actor since Robin Williams first proved he could do dramatic work back in the 80s, and I honestly would not be surprised to see Ferrell's name mentioned come Award time. It should also be noted that the relationship he builds with Maggie Gyllenhaal's character is genuinely winning in its sweetness and honesty. Both actors have amazing chemistry together, and are able to make each dialogue exchange stand out. Dustin Hoffman has a small but important role as Crick's main ally in his search for finding the source of the voice he keeps on hearing, and is able to pull off the role splendidly, especially during some scenes late in the film where his character must make a difficult decision. Emma Thompson is wonderfully dry and somewhat dark as the author in control of Crick's fate, though she doesn't realize it. Her obsession with death as she tries to think of a proper way to kill off her main character at the end of the story comes across as a bizarre fascination, rather than being morbid, and delivers some of the biggest laughs in the film. The only performance that fails to leave a strong impression is given by Queen Latifah as Thompson's assistant, and it's not because she doesn't try as hard as the others. There's just less to her character than everyone else, and has less to work with.

This small complaint aside, I haven't walked out of a movie this satisfied since seeing United 93 back in April. Stranger Than Fiction knows how to hit every right note, and is a remarkable first effort for novice screenwriter Zach Helm. Variety has labeled him as being one of "10 Writers to Watch", and I personally couldn't agree more. I can't wait to see what he does next. This is a remarkable and wonderful film, and one that deserves to find an audience. It certainly caught me off guard. I walked in expecting a quirky and inventive comedy, and wound up getting that and much more. Stranger Than Fiction may not change the world, but it may make you stop and think, and possibly look at yourself a little differently.

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