the two three certainties in life
Speaking of death and Hollywood, I saw Stranger Than Fiction the other night. Spoilers follow the page break …
First of all, Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a beautiful, sexy, vibrant woman. And Will Ferrell plays a stolid, socially inept bore. The story follows his character’s development into a living person, but apparently the man just doesn’t have the range to pull it off, and I found the romantic sub-plot completely implausible. While Ferrell is never really un-likable, I personally never noticed any reason for Ana to find Harold actually appealing.
But. So Maggie is great, Emma Thompson is genius, and Dustin Hoffman is fun. A cameo by Tom Hulce is also a lot of fun. (I knew I recognized him but couldn’t place him until I saw his name in the credits.) Also, the graphics in the movie are really well done. All pluses and the movie is definitely worth seeing (DVD) on these counts.
But then we get to the meat of the movie, which is the script and direction. I love the premise and it provides ample opportunities for self-referential humor and literary in-jokes, which I appreciate, even though I know I missed some of them. Apparently disconnected threads resurface from time to time and Emma’s character Kay speaks of hidden interconnections at work in the world. So it’s all quite clever and funny and well-made and focuses on the struggle for Kay to discover the right ending for her book, which means the movie becomes all about its own ending, which you figure as you watch it, will have to be very, very clever indeed. And … then we get to it. The movie bails, capitulates, drops the ball, and otherwise fails to deliver the goods. The last ten minutes could be replaced by a slideshow of those cheesy inspirational posters, and the effect would be roughly the same. Blech.
I wonder if there was an alternate, non-pablum ending that didn’t make it past the producers, etc. They should have renamed Kay’s book “Death, Taxes, and Hollywood Endings That Suck.”
Anyway. It’s fun enough. DVD it.