Stranger Than Fiction joins the long line of films that begin with a great premise, yet fail to deliver the story goods. This failure comes not as a result of bad directing or poor acting choices, but rather as a result of an inconsistent and faulty story structure. When setting up the dramatics of a story it’s important to make sure that the audience understands exactly to whom the story belongs.

*****************SPOLIER ALERT!!***********************

Personal Reflections

A review of Stranger Than Fiction from early last November perfectly sums up my problems with this film:

Moviegoers are more likely to be intrigued by the premise of “Stranger Than Fiction” than by the payoff.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited for a film that ended up letting me down this much (except for maybe Episode 1).

I remember an issue of Entertainment Weekly last summer that featured a page from the script for Stranger Than Fiction. I was so jealous. What a great concept for a movie! A regular man starts hearing the voice of a narrator who describes in exact detail everything what that man is thinking and going through. Why couldn’t I think of something like that?

Furthermore, it starred Will Ferrell. I’ve been a long time Will Ferrell fan and thought this would be the perfect chance to see him work with a character that was a bit more developed than his previous roles.

To me, it seemed like the perfect mix ofThe Truman Show tossed together with copious in-jokes towards the art of narrative fiction. Seemed to me like a guaranteed smash hit!

But man, was I ever wrong.

Within ten minutes I was so frustrated that I could barely sit still in my seat. I kept getting up to get a drink of water, or something to eat, or simply to stretch my legs. What a waste of a perfectly good concept.

One Main Character is Plenty

I can trace exactly the precise moment in which the entire story fell apart for me.

The story began quite nicely with the introduction of Harold Krick (Will Ferrell) and his number-obsessed tax assessor. We get a feeling for what it’s like to do the same thing every day, to count every brush stroke, to walk the precise amount of steps across the street, and to arrive at the bus stop at the right exact time every single day.

Problems begin once Harold starts hearing the voice of his own personal narrator, Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson doing her best Hugh Grant impersonation). A smile stretched across my face as Will started doing what he does best: completely freaking out in grand comedic style. He smashes furniture and generally makes an ass out of himself in front of strangers and his co-workers as he tries to get a hold on this most intrusive voice.

I saw it at home, but I’m sure audiences in the theater were enjoying it just as much as I was.

Little did we know, though, that the story was about to take a change for the worse.

The scene changes, and suddenly, out of nowhere, we’re looking at Kay’s hands as she stands precariously on the precipice of a very large building, almost as if she is ready to jump. It’s a very personal and startling viewpoint that comes to us in stark contrast to what we have seen up until then. The camera is placed in such a way that we are Kay holding our outstretched hands 50 stories above street level.

The tires on my story-reception car came to a sCREEECHING halt!

“What story am I watching here?” I began to ask myself. “I thought we were going to be watching a film about Harold, now we’re watching one about this author suffering through writer’s block?”

Who wants to see another movie about a struggling writer?

Main Character is a Perspective

Now it would have been fine to have two Main Characters if they both shared the same perspective, e.g. Dash and Mr. Incredible in The Incredibles or any of the five Main Characters in South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. Or, you could have several different Main Characters if you were writing an ensemble piece like Babel or Traffic or Crash. These ensemble pieces work because they often focus more on the thematics of the story rather than the characters themselves.

When you change the perspective, you change the meaning

But Stranger Than Fiction does not feel like an ensemble piece. And it certainly does not have similar Main Characters.

Harold and Kay have two completely different types of throughlines. Harold’s is more of a situational throughline and as such, deals with external fixed problems. There’s a voice stuck in his head that he can’t get rid of and he takes very physical actions to try and overcome it. He scrambles around his apartment looking for the voice. He smashes a lamp to see if the narration will change. He seeks help from physicians and psychologists.¹ All of these are very external physical responses.

Kay, on the other hand, is suffering from a problematic way of thinking and thus prefers to solve her problems internally. The reason for all her smoking and agnst comes from the fact that she can’t come up with a way to kill Harold Krick and therefore can’t finish her book. In sharp contrast to Harold’s throughline, empathizing with her problems is very much a psyhcological experience. Several times, we are treated to an intimate look at her imagination (falling off a building, driving off a bridge into the river) as she tries to figure out the best way to kill Harold off.

The Main Character in a story is supposed to represent the audience’s view point of the central inequity. It’s an intimate look at the problem and is experienced as if we are the Main Character. Having two separate and wildly different takes on this perspective seriously confuses the audience and makes it impossible to gather any meaning from the story. At the very least, it creates two separate storyforms with entirely different meanings. Here, it simply doesn’t work.

Wrapping It All Up Right at the End

And how funny is it that, just days after writing about not ending a movie with a cheesy line, I see a movie that does the exact same thing! When you change the perspective you change the meaning, or in this case, you muddle it. That is precisely why they felt the need to clarify the message of the story in the last three minutes. As BoxOfficeMojo puts it:

Miss Thompson’s narrative weaves in and out, with startling inconsistency, interrupting the romance, and the What If? construct finally overtakes real and wannabe characters in an oversimplified replay of the ancient idea that man’s highest purpose is sacrifice. In the meantime, life’s big payoffs include hugs, home-baked cookies and a glass of milk.

Now, what they have to say (that a man willing to sacrifice his life to save a kid is worth not killing) is not entirely cheesy, but the way in which they do it is - at least from a story lover’s standpoint. The need to spell out exactly why Kay changed her story is a great sign that the story did not accomplish it on its own. There should be no reason, especially through voice-over narrative, to explain what the story meant. It’s ironic that a movie about an author struggling with how to end her novel has problems of its own trying to come to a harmonious end.

As Rotten Tomatoes so aptly puts it:

The movie’s tidy lessons makes it feel like Charlie Kaufman-lite.

Conclusion

I have a feeling that the disappointment at the box office for this film has as much to do with a broken promise as it does with the broken story. Audiences came to this story expecting a story focusing on the plight of Will Ferrell stuck in a real-life novel. After all, the original one-sheet itself speaks of nothing more than this poor man stuck in an unfortunate and deadly situation. 

Nowhere were we informed that the emotional plight of Harold’s author was going to be just as important. We came to the film expecting one thing, but were given something completely different and consequently, far more confusing.

Who exactly is the main Character supposed to be? Who’s shoes are we to stand in?

It’s almost as if they started out wanting to write this great concept story about Harold but then became more intrigued with the struggles and tribulations of Kay the author. After all, most of the stories we write as authors are merely attempts to deal with our own personal problems. Unfortunately for Stranger Than Fiction, the dueling Main Character perspectives compete for our empathy in such a way that muddles the meaning of the story and disappoints those who came to the film expecting something else.

Footnotes for this article

1. Will somebody please tell me why you would have the great Linda Hunt and Tom Hulce in a film and only have them appear for one shot!! Unbelievable!↩

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