Stranger than Fiction (PG-13)
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Caution: spoilers.

This came out in 2006, but I didn't see it until 2017. Before I watched it, I thought I'd probably put the review under "weird movies," but it could have gone in other categories. It has an unexplained fantastical element to it, but I can't quite think of it as fantasy. Certainly it is a comedy, but it also has dramatic elements. And it includes a fairly sweet little romantic subplot. And I suppose I could almost call it an "art film." But in the end, I decided to categorize it as "quirky."

Will Ferrell plays an IRS agent named Harold Crick. One day, he suddenly notices that his life is being narrated by the voice of a British woman (Emma Thompson). Naturally, this freaks him out, and he tries to figure out what the hell is going on. He becomes particularly desperate to figure it out when the voice refers to his death as "imminent." He seeks help from a psychiatrist (Linda Hunt), but he dismisses her belief that he has schizophrenia. He asks, hypothetically, if the voice were real, what he should do. She suggests talking with a literary expert (though I don't think she believed there was any chance that the voice was real). So, Harold begins consulting with a professor of literature named Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman). Meanwhile, Harold had recently met a baker named Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal), whom he was auditing because she had chosen to only pay part of her taxes. (She was perfectly happy to pay the part that went to infrastructure, but not the military and corporate bailouts and such. Her logic seems flawed to me- it's not like the government would just put her money to the uses she deemed acceptable- but I do admire her principles, imagination, and spunk.) And Harold is immediately attracted to her (a fact which his mysterious narrator made evident, and I think the fact that she did so probably made him more likely to eventually pursue a relationship with Ana, which otherwise he probably never would have done). Of course Ana was predisposed to dislike him simply because he was auditing her, and the fact that she caught him absentmindedly staring at her chest certainly didn't help. (Though again, I doubt he would have done that if he hadn't been distracted by what the narrator was saying about what he was thinking about Ana. Honestly, I'm not certain Harold would have even consciously thought much about her attractiveness if the narrator hadn't been so specific about it... although she didn't even mention Ana's breasts.) Anyway... after their initial, less-than-ideal meeting, Harold and Ana would later meet again, and things would go somewhat better, from then on.

Meanwhile, there is a writer named Karen Eiffel (Thompson), who frequently imagines her own death as "research" on how to kill off the protagonist of her latest book. But since she is behind schedule, her publisher hires an assistant for her, named Penny Escher (Queen Latifah), to help her overcome her writer's block and finish the book. And the protagonist of the book is Harold Crick, though of course Karen has no idea that he actually exists, nor that he has been hearing her narration of his life. (As I said, how this is possible is never explained.) It's inevitable, I suppose, that Harold and Karen would eventually meet each other, and have to somehow deal with this bizarre situation. What's less inevitable, I would have thought, is that once they do meet, there's even any question as to whether or not Karen should actually finish the book. I mean, granted it's hard to believe that her typing up his death scene would actually cause him to die in real life, but then again, everything else she narrated about him actually happened. So... I suppose it's really not worth the risk. Except... it does become a question, and while I still find that hard to completely believe, I actually didn't find it completely unbelievable, either.

Well... except for this one thing. And I really don't want to spoil too much more about the movie's plot, but I kind of have to. It's just, I never really found it believable that her book-in-progress is as good as it's made out to be. I mean, Harold is a nice guy, but he's incredibly dull. I kept thinking that the only thing that made him an interesting character at all was the fact that he was hearing this voice narrating his life. And that part wasn't in Karen's book. Which, really, is odd. Her narration is far from constant, and there's got to be a lot to her story that we never hear. Which makes me wonder how some of the things that Harold does, or that happen to him, could have possibly happened in the book without his reactions to the narration explaining his actions. Like, as I said, I don't think he ever would have started a relationship with Ana if all this other weirdness wasn't happening to him. I suppose Karen wanted her character to end up with her (and btw, it's also weird that it's never specifically mentioned by anyone that Karen was also writing about this second real person she had no idea was real). But I can't imagine how the author got them together without using this situation she was unaware of as a catalyst. (Then again, I have no idea how anyone starts romantic relationships in real real life, so maybe what little the movie shows us of Harold and Ana's interactions make sense, anyway. I dunno.) In any event, I do think the two of them were really cute together. And they probably actually make sense as a couple, but only with Harold coming out of his shell to a degree he wouldn't have without the narration. (Which, btw, I'm glad he doesn't tell Ana about. Because despite all the suspension of disbelief that the movie's basic premise requires, I don't think I'd be able to believe her not thinking he was crazy if he had told her about it.) And it's more than his just being dull... he also seems to have a touch of OCD, which he also just suddenly overcomes far more easily than should be possible... unless we just accept that he is able to do so because the author says he does it. But anyway, beyond all of this... the whole idea of Harold not being an interesting character without the strange narration situation... there's the way Karen eventually comes up with for him to die (before she finds out he's real). It's not bad, but I don't think it was nearly as epic as it's made out to be, by the people who read it (before it was typed up; because just jotting it down in an outline doesn't cause it to happen). Honestly, I couldn't imagine it would be that awesome, and I'm kind of glad it wasn't. I mean, its only being okay, as literary deaths go, kind of undercuts the dramatic tension of the question of whether it's worth actually finishing the book... but on the other hand....

Meh. Whatever. I'm done spoiling stuff. Does Harold die, in the end? I won't tell you. If you watch the movie, you probably won't find the ending surprising, but then again... I honestly don't think I would have been surprised either way. And that, in itself, is kind of a neat trick. (Other viewers might well disagree with me on that point, but this is my review, and I say it could have gone either way. So there.) Anyway, I enjoyed the movie. It could have been better, but it would have been really difficult to pull it off. And I'm okay with it being just okay.

And then, after watching the movie, I brushed my teeth, because it was bedtime. As usual, I did not count my brushstrokes. Then I wrote this review. The end.