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Stranger Than Fic­tion is the story of Harold Crick, an IRS audi­tor, played by Will Fer­rell. While this film is a bit of a com­edy, it’s not Will Ferrell’s stan­dard fare. In fact, he plays this role fairly straight. In the movie he’s liv­ing a pre­dictable life of his own choos­ing when sud­denly he hears a voice, one no one else can hear, that begins to annoy­ingly nar­rate his life. That being chal­leng­ing enough to bear, the always accu­rate nar­ra­tive voice one day pre­dicts his death which changes every­thing. The ‘voice’ is that of Karen Eif­fel, played by Emma Thomp­son, who is cur­rently writ­ing a novel that is indeed telling the story of Harold Crick and hav­ing trou­ble fig­ur­ing out how to kill him. A cer­tain amount of this movie is about her char­ac­ter. Dustin Hoff­man plays the role of lit­er­ary advi­sor to Harold and Mag­gie Gyl­len­haal plays the woman who makes him want some­thing more in life.

Thought it was a lit­tle slow at times, I found this movie intrigu­ing. Part of the time I was wait­ing for Will Fer­rell to do some outrageously, comedic, stupid bit which amaz­ingly didn’t hap­pen though much of his more sub­tle funny stuff made it through. The other part had me won­der­ing where it was all going as, over time, it seemed to become less and less of a com­edy and more of a roman­tic drama. I’ve never been much of a fan of Will Fer­rell and tend to pass on films he stars in but I’m moved to say I liked him in this. In fact it was such a sur­prise that I give it a 4 out of 5 marks. It’s one of very few films that I’ve sit through more than once.