Stranger Than Fiction

Odd film this.

Will Ferrell plays Harold Crick, an IRS auditor who's hearing a woman's voice, narrating his life.

Dr. Mittag-Leffler: I'm afraid what you're describing is schizophrenia.
Harold Crick: No, no. It's not schizophrenia. It's just a voice in my head. I mean, the voice isn't telling me to do anything. It's telling me what I've already done... accurately, and with a better vocabulary.
Dr. Mittag-Leffler: Mr. Crick, I hate to sound like a broken record, but that's schizophrenia.

Emma Thompson in the narrator he's hearing: Karen Eiffel, an author who's trying to kill the lead character in her book, a book which she's been writing for the last 10 years. Harold does his best to ignore the voice up until the point where it tells him he's going to die in a week.

Will Ferrell is basically pulling a trick out of Jim Carrey's book and doing a straight film with comedy elements, ala The Truman Show. He pulls it off remarkably well, and given than for large parts of this film, he's the only one in the scene, it's quite impressive for someone thought of as 'just a comedy actor,' a phrase that is one of the worst curses in Hollywood. Maggie Gyllenhall is cast perfectly as Anna, a romantic lead required to avoid being a-typical Hollywood stunning and beautiful, but instead to entice and captivate Harold's heart.
Dustin Hoffman plays a professor of literature helping Harold. The quiz he gives him had me giggling.

Dr. Jules Hilbert: What is your favorite word?
Harold Crick: Integer.

The story is quite slow paced, and although it does have humour, there's little in the 'laugh-out-loud' category. That's not a problem as the story is both bizarre and straight-laced and that level of comedy would have swamped it and drowned out the message completely.

Utterly brilliant ending. Thoroughly recommended.

Score: B. Entertaining, but not the all out comedy I had been promised by the trailer.

OQ: Every weekday, for twelve years, Harold would tie his tie in a single Windsor knot instead of the double, thereby saving up to forty-three seconds. His wristwatch thought the single Windsor made his neck look fat, but said nothing.

Trivia: To portray someone not sleeping and plagued with writer's block, Emma Thompson wore no make-up during the filming.