[Spiwak]

Stranger than Fiction, my brief informal review:

What a peculiar movie. It seems stuck on that duplicitous fine line that separates comedy and drama (or shall I say, tragedy), and, more poignantly, the line between reality and fiction. Thankfully, the film flaunts these virtues, integrating them into a story that was made for that effect. What we have in this movie is a cast full of seeming charicatures: Harold Crick the lonely man who counts brush strokes (36 times verticaly, and 36 times horizontally, on each tooth) and has an exact schedule worked out to exact numbers; Karen Eiffel the quivering writer struggling with writer's block and who could snap at any moment; Penny Escher the bureaucratic and drilling writer-motivator who never misses a deadline; Prof. Jules Hilbert the literary scholar who dresses casually because he is a literary scholar and who is always surrounded by an organized stack of papers and books; and Ana Pascal the tattooed liberal that doesn't pay her taxes out of a symbolic political gesture whom you do not want to anger. I deliberately described these characters as they're first given to us, which doesn't amount to much more than stock characters. But by the end of the movie they all seem much more alive than they do upon first impressions, thanks in part to the merits of the screenplay but probably mostly due to the rather incredible cast, none of whom fail to create human beings that we care about but more importantly that we think could exist.

This is important for the movie, considering it is precisely about the dichotomy between reality and fiction. Harold Crick is a character, and appropriately charicaturish when we think he is merely a character, but he is also a person and is thus made to be much more human (for instance, he has friends, he's actually pretty funny but perhaps just doesn't have enough oppurtunities to show it; when he's happy we too feel happy and when he cries we empathize. One of the questions Forster asks us to consider is when fiction becomes reality. If Harold Crick is a character and a person then by turns wouldn't everyone around him also be real and unreal, including Karen Eiffel? Is the movie we're seeing also real? How much of Crick's characterization in the movie is independent of Eiffel's narration, and how much of it occurs because of said narration?

[SPOILERS] The other major theme, less subtle than the first, in this movie is the moral responsibilty of art. What is more important, the temporary life of a man or the everlasting masterpiece that could have been Karen Eiffel's book had she killed him. The approach to the question is novel (pun intended), but the question itself does carry some weight, hearing myths of workers dying during difficult movie productions and to an arguably lesser extent animals. Thankfully the filmmakers did not bow out of the question, perhaps by creating a twist that involved all of it being imagined or something to that effect. No, I liked that Harold Crick and Karen Eiffel were real people to the end, not slaves to their archetypal obligations. [END SPOILERS]

One thing I can say about Marc Forster is that he's inconsistent. Finding Neverland was pretty good, but I didn't like Monster's Ball that much, and I never saw the almost-universally panned Stay. Stranger than Fiction should prove a landmark in his directorial career, even though he hasn't received much billing or attention at all for it. Hopefully the movie will prove a contender in this year's Academy Awards in regards especially to the incredible cast and the imaginative screenplay and the competent direction. It's almost a certainty that it will appear in my list of the top ten for the year.