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 stranger than fiction
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Voices in the dark. It’s an established symptom of schizophrenia: the voice in your head that starts talking to you. Uptight IRS agent Harold Crick starts hearing a voice, and, though totally baffled, remains convinced that he’s not crazy. For one thing, the voice in his head isn’t talking to him. “It’s talking about me,” he explains, “with a better vocabulary.” What Stranger Than Fiction, the new film from Finding Neverland director Marc Forster, written by newcomer Zack Helm, posits is that Crick (Will Ferrell) is actually a character in a novel. Once he begins hearing his humdrum life narrated, and even that he’s about to meet his imminent demise, Crick is forced to go in search of his own author, the misanthropic, chain-smoking writer Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson) famed for killing off her literary creations. Crick enlists the help of a literary professor (Dustin Hoffman), whose advice is to “determine conclusively whether you are in a comedy or a tragedy. Have you met anyone who simply might loathe the very core of you?” Not a great question when you’re a taxman. For Will Ferrell himself, the answer is clear. “Oh, my life is complete comedy,” he admits. “I’ve been so blessed.” An engaging cross between Pirandello and Charlie Kaufman, but without the former’s rigour (Crick’s narrator takes several convenient timeouts) or the latter’s delightful surrealistic streak, Stranger Than Fiction does ask some interesting questions about whether our fate is “written” by anyone other than ourselves. Is Harold Crick simply undergoing the literary equivalent of Jim Carrey’s televisual torture in The Truman Show, or does he have some control over these external forces? Does anyone?  “It’s quite a complicated question,” notes Emma Thompson. “I think our destiny lays in our habits, our daily habits. This is what sometimes kills you: your own routine. I think that to free yourself in a way from your destiny, you need to break the routine. In a way we can write the story of our life at all times. I do write the story of my life in my head every day.” The scenario must resonate with peculiar dramatic irony for actors who spend most of their working lives actually playing out other characters’ – factual or fictional - scripted lives. So who would play them in a movie of their own life? Thompson seems stumped, but Ferrell knows exactly who would fit the bill. “Definitely Charlton Heston,” he deadpans. “Shirtless.”
Leigh Singer
Stranger Than Fiction, on national release 01 December 06.
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