Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Josh Frankel
Will Ferrell could go on playing Ron Burgandys and Chazz Reinholds, incorrectly historicizing the origins of the city of San Diego, scoring desperate ladies for breakfast and shouting down his unseen mother for some meatloaf for he and his guest, for the rest of his career, but it’s probably better that he’s not going to do that. He’ll probably play another elf and he’ll probably line up a few more roles portraying the same kinds of characters that the late Chris Farley used to play, but he’s stretching his legs in “Stranger Than Fiction.” It’s a start.

He’s not going for the same kind of humor as he was in “Old School” or “Anchorman.” He’s subdued as Harold Crick, a senior agent for the Internal Revenue Service. His most reliable companions are his internalized calculator and a trusty watch, not a dog that craps in refrigerators and can communicate with grizzly bears. It wasn’t a gutsy move to tone down his antics and become more of an actor than a slapstick deliverer. It was a necessary one to finally jostle his career from remaining so one-sided, so heavy on the college humor. He, Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson were getting ragged on left and right for continuing to walk the same road, getting laughs in different but similar ways and not really proving that they can act their way out of a paper bag. We were starting to want to forget about them, put them into a category of those old dogs without new tricks.

Here Ferrell is not going for the funny all that often, but acting almost sedated in a regimented character in a life crisis. His life had structure and precise meaning – where a coffee break was programmed internally to the second, his steps were counted and he was followed invisibly by brackets, integers and square roots. The brushing of his teeth is exact and he’s got no real brightness to a life that’s spent among the brushing of manila folders that he secretly likens to the waves of a vast ocean. This secret is exposed when Harold, one day, begins to hear a narrator’s voice speaking, detailing various moves with a glossy vocabulary and an English accent. The voice tells him that he has no idea that his death is pending. This freaks him out. He goes to an English literature professor at a local college (Dustin Hoffman), who’s taught an entire course in “Little did he know,” and tries to help Crick figure out which story he’s in. Or more exactly, which kind of story he’s in – a tragedy or a comedy. When a potential love interest – the mesmerizing Anna Pascal, a law school dropout who refuses to pay some of her taxes and makes the world a rosier place through cupcakes and cookies, played by the absolute smokeshow Maggie Gyllenhaal – comes into the picture, Crick thinks he knows what he’s in, telling Pascal, “This may sound like gibberish to you, but I think I’m in a tragedy.”

When Crick hears the narrator’s death warning, it signifies for him the unpleasant idea that his “important” life was marked for an end and he didn’t want it to be so, just as no one wants to die before they deserve it. He was too young for being wiped out. The reality of the situation was that Crick wasn’t really living life as well as he could have been living it. A loss of it wouldn’t be as tragic as he wanted to believe. He crunched numbers and followed regulations. He dined alone, slept alone and contributed nothing outside of himself. He couldn’t possibly be that broken up about not having that life to lead still. But he was and as his relationship with Pascal developed into romance after he played “Whole Wide World” by Wreckless Eric and had brought her a bouquet of flours, he found the meaningful nuggets in his life that were worth holding onto. Even so, when the author writing his story (Kay Eiffel, played by Emma Thompson) and he found each other and she provided him with an untyped manuscript of the ending (thereby not making it real yet), Crick was able to see that for the entire story to be right, all the details mattered. He knew that he must be killed for the book to end, for a life worth living can’t be done without the details, the peccadilloes and idiosyncrasies. Buying a bag of popcorn and a hot dog at a baseball game matters. Cherishing the frosting on that birthday cake and knocking out all of the fires on top of all the candles matters. Finding love in the eyelashes or dimples of another person matters. Crick hadn’t been wrong in his life of detail. He’d packed so many in and not realized their importance. It took another person to help put it all into perspective. As the movie says at its conclusion, “The anomalies are here to save our lives.” It could go for Ferrell not playing another dude the frat boys will never cease to quote or it can go for picking out and cutting down your own Christmas tree this year. It can go for the homemade cookies that you’ve never before tried, still warm and soft from the oven.