Stranger than Fiction - Will Ferrell & Emma Thompson

This is day number two of my no-reading week, but I did manage to find a fun, book-related movie today to help ease some of the pain of my book-withdrawal. I'm referring to a 2006 movie called Stranger than Fiction starring Will Farrell, Emma Thompson, Dustin Hoffman, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Queen Latifa. 

I suppose that Stranger than Fiction could be categorized as more of a romantic comedy than anything else, but its unusual plot is what really caught my attention. Will Farrell plays an IRS auditor who hears a voiceover in his head describing everything he does. The voice narrates his toothbrushing technique, his necktie choice, the speed at which he walks to the bus stop, etc., until it begins to drive him nuts.  His search for answers leads him, of all things, to a literature professor who recognizes that the narration described by Farrell sounds an awful lot like words from a novel.

And as it turns out, the Will Farrell character is actually the central character of a novel being written by the Emma Thompson character.  Farrell, of course, knows nothing about Thompson, but Thompson is equally in the dark about their situation. She has no idea that the character she’s in the process of creating is walking around in the real world. The scary thing for Farrell, is that Thompson has killed off the central character of all eight of her previous novels, so it seems to be just a matter of time before his own turn comes.  And then one day, Farrell hears the voice in his head say that, even though he doesn’t know it, his own death is fast approaching.

In the middle of all this, the Farrell character is falling in love with a baker he’s been assigned to audit, a rebellious young woman who purposely underpaid her taxes by 22 percent in protest of how the government uses its tax revenue.  So now that he knows that the novelist is about to kill him off, what is our friendly IRS auditor to do?

He starts with a visit to the writer’s apartment - and that’s when things really get interesting.

Stranger than Fiction is fun, but I think it chickened out on the ending it should have had, and that makes the movie’s attempt to pull hard on the heartstrings not very effective.  In the end this is kind of a throwaway movie, and I’m a bit surprised that actors like Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman were part of it.  But during this no-book week, I’m really, really glad that I found it.