Stranger Than Fiction

It’s Charlie Kaufman’s world and we just live in it. At least it feels that way at the movies, between Michel Gondry’s Science of Sleep and this Chicago-set mind-bender scripted by DePaul Drama School graduate Zach Helm. Following Kaufman’s lead into territory formerly controlled by metafiction maestro Jorge Luis Borges and absurdist playwright Luigi Pirandello, Helm imagines an ordinary man who discovers that he is a character in a novel.

Harold Crick (Ferrell) wouldn’t seem to qualify as the protagonist of anything more exciting than a tax code manual. He’s an IRS auditor who lives and dines alone, brushes his teeth with machinelike precision and does rapid and effortless calculations in his head. He’s so uptight that when a baker he’s auditing (Gyllenhaal) flirtatiously offers him homemade cookies, he declines them as a conflict of interest. In short, he’s a broad version of that venerable Hollywood cliché, the buttoned-down guy who needs to loosen up and live a little.

Harold’s tidy, empty life is infused with drama when he starts hearing a woman’s voice in his head, narrating his thoughts and deeds. This distresses him, understandably, but things get worse when the voice announces that he’s about to die. The warning sets Harold on a quest to find the omniscient storyteller who controls his fate.

After consulting a psychiatrist (who offers the banal diagnosis of schizophrenia), Harold turns to literature professor Julius Hilbert (Hoffman, having a ball). The prof doesn’t care if Harold is crazy, but he’s intrigued with figuring out just what kind of story he’s part of and who is writing it.

Meanwhile (as a clumsy novelist might say), we also spend time with Harold’s creator, Kay Eiffel (Thompson, wonderfully convincing, even though Eiffel’s writing is pretty hackneyed). She’s fighting a case of writer’s block so bad that her publisher has hooked her up with Penny Escher (Latifah), a specialist in helping writers finish their work. Eiffel’s weirdly austere apartment and Escher’s strangely vague way of talking about her employer suggests that they might be cosmic beings, unless they too are fictional characters in yet another writer’s work. (“Escher,” of course, is meant to evokes those crazy infinity-patterned engravings of the Swiss artist of the same name.)

Helm is clearly having fun with his premise, and he’s clever enough about structure to wrap things up neatly but not too cutely. But as clever as it is in places, Fiction is also intermittently naïve and even dumb. Hilbert tosses around a few lit-crit buzzwords and names, but loses academic credibililty by fixating on the moot question of whether Harold’s story is a tragedy or a comedy. Any Lit 101 grad knows that those categories of ancient Greek theater don’t really apply to fiction. Some novels are funny, some are sad and many are both, but no scholar divides all of literature into those two camps. Modern and postmodern, maybe, but not tragedy and comedy.

That may seem like nitpicking, but it’s the fine points like this that place Kaufman’s ultrasmart (if sometimes too-smart-for-his-own-good) metaphysical shenanigans in a higher bracket than Helm’s. This is Kaufman, the middlebrow version.

Not that there’s anything so wrong with that. Sometimes middlebrow gets a bad rap. While keeping things light, Helm addresses some of the big questions: How can we understand a God (or an author) who makes bad things happen? Is self-sacrifice the only road to fulfillment? Can we really change the course of our lives, or are we pawns in a story too large and complex for us to understand? And finally, how do Hoffman and Thompson steal a comedy from Ferrell? That’s really something to ponder after the credits roll.

Stranger Than Fiction opens Friday 10 in local theaters.