That’s funny, I thought it was sexy as hell.
That bus scene annoyed me even more, because, IIRC, Harold apologizes to her on the bus, when he had much less to apologize for (staring at her chest a little too long) than she did (treating him absolutely horribly all day long). That confirmed to me that she was a smug, self-absorbed jerk, rather than make me like her. So I was less inclined to buy it later on when she actually did behave decently.
Originally Posted by Exapno Mapcase
Originally Posted by Baldwin
Exactly. Peter Pan is a fictional character; if he tells a story to Wendy, how closely are you going to critique that story?
Let me help. If you go out to the theaters now, you can see a movie called Stranger Than Fiction. This is a work of fiction. Within this work of fiction, a fictional novelist, a movie character named Kay Eiffel, is writing a novel called Death and Taxes (or trying to, since she’s been at it for ten years). So the movie is fictional, while the novel is fictitious, and only exists as an idea and a few exerpts of narration. Frankly, it’s a novel that doesn’t sound that great to me, but whithin the fictional world of the movie, it’s a masterpiece.
So, the movie Stranger Than Fiction is a work of metafiction.
There’s another character called Harold Crick. Here’s the deal: Harold is simultaneously a character in the fictional movie, Stranger Than Fiction, and in the fictitious novel, Death and Taxes. He becomes aware of his status as a character in the novel (fictional in his world, fictitious in ours), but can’t do much about it; he discovers that the story he inhabits is plot-driven rather than character-driven.
When Harold meets and is smitten with the baker, Ana Pascal, he’s being driven by a well-worn fictional convention used by the fictional novelist, Kay Eiffel, in her fictitious novel, Death and Taxes. When he wins Ana by, first, the gesture of giving her flours, and then the amazing coincidence that the one song he can play on the guitar is an obscure 1978 song that she happens to know and love, then the situation is patently unlikely, and shows the writer bypassing the characters – but the writer in question is Kay Eiffel, a fictional writer writing a fictitious novel. Zach Helm, the screenwriter of Stranger Than Fiction, probably would not have presented quite that scenario if he were simply writing about the characters Harold and Ana, instead of writing about Kay writing about Harold and Ana.
Similarly, if Ana’s shift in behavior is a little abrupt, that’s also a very old convention (probably old when Shakespeare used it in Much Ado About Nothing. I can certainly forgive the fictional novelist for wanting to use it in her fictitious book. Actually, I can forgive it if a real writer wants to use it in a fictional work with no metafictional device, because it happens in real life, as do many cliches. Sometimes couples do start out as antogonists; hostile attention is still attention, and if an underlying basis for attraction exists, it can flip like a dime.
(There’s a really famous work of metafiction in which these distinctions mean nothing – The Thousand Nights and a Night. There, you might be reading a story within a story within a story, and there’s the same level of plausibility in each story. For instance, a prince who’s been turned to stone from the waste down might be reciting a story about a talking bird told to him by a monocular monkey.)
Make that from the waist down. Yuck.
The problem with your entire scenario is that half the movie is about Harold going “off-book.” Kay Eiffel is patently not writing the scenes in which Harold is going to human relations or the psychiatrist or the professor to discuss the problems of having a voice in his head. There is no reason in the novel for him to stop going to work and start living with his friend. The real-life Herald takes over.
When? Because it is a movie, rather than a novel, the movie stops giving us the narration of what Harold is doing very early on. After that point there is no good way of knowing which actions Harold is taking on his own and which actions are being dictated by Kay.
Is Harold’s choice of the guitar something of his or of Kay’s? If the song his or Kay’s? Is Ana his or Kay’s? How much of Ana is in the novel? (I think she is only mentioned on the bus.) If the song is Kay’s then you have to imagine the Kay Eiffel we saw in her scenes in the movie coming up with that song in her novel, which is equally impossible.
The movie works because it is a movie. There was no novel at any time. We get tiny fragments of excerpts from what is supposed to be a novel, but they don’t add up to anything of what a novel should be. Most of the movie is outside of the novel, because Kay Eiffel isn’t writing metafiction, she’s writing a book, and virtually everything Harold does after the voice in his head stops cannot possibly be in the book.
It’s a movie. The writer/director made a weird choice. There is no way to push off the responsibility to the story within the story because that would mean invalidating much of the rest of the movie. Occam’s Razor applies here. To accept one impossibility means that you have to accept a boatload more. Doesn’t work for me.
I agree with almost all of this. For most of the movie, I was sure he wasn’t going to die (hey, it’s Hollywood). Then it started to look like saving him would totally be the wrong ending. But in the end, it worked. Kay made the right choice (as, of course, did Harold).
I saw this yesterday, and I thought it was cute. I don’t think it handled the whole “meta” concept very imaginatively (or coherently) but I decided to just think of it as a story about the concept of fictional characters seeming so real to the author/reader and being able to take on a life of their own (like when authors say that their characters do things that they never expected/wanted them to do).
I’m pretty sure I read that the Music Supervisor/Soundtrack Coordinator was Britt Daniel of Spoon, so it might have been his choice.
I don’t think Hoffman’s character thinks that it’s morally right that Harold has to die according to Kay’s storyline. I think Hoffman’s character thinks that the death is inevitable. Hoffman’s character is an expert on literary theory. He knows that every story is a comedy or tragedy–he cites no less a literary figure than Italo Calvino to prove it–and that Harold’s life is a story. As Hoffman’s character sees it, every story must be one or the other, and the story of Harold’s life is a tragedy. Q.E.D. (from the perspective of Hoffman’s character, of course.)
I was bummed by the sort of cop-out ending - even though it mirrored the cop-out ending in the book. Everything else about the movie though, I found surprisingly endearing, especially Will Ferrell, who I normally find entirely uninteresting.
Sorry for resurrecting this thread, but Denmark is a bit behind, and I just saw this movie now.
I love these kinds of movies. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Adaptation are two of my favorite movies. Even The Last Action Hero, I think is excellent. And this movie has an idea that’s at least as good as these other ones.
But it turns out to be pretty mediocre.
First, it’s a total waste of the absurd situation not to make it funny. But they didn’t. Failing at that, it then also fails to be insightful in the subject, literary theory. What did we learn? That “little did he know” means that there is something the character doesn’t know? That was how the professor initially showed off his knowledge.
Second, the concept was not carried out perfectly. For instance, in the first scene, the narrator is repeating the same line several times. What does this mean, that she is writing the same line several times in her book? Also, I would have liked it better if we heard the narrator each time it was part of the book.
Third, the characters were unbelievable. The baking girl hates him, he brings flowers, and then she loves him. Harold agrees to self-sacrifice to save the book’s “brilliant” ending.
Oh, and this is true as well. The script writer must have known that this didn’t make sense, and yet written it anyway for effect. The bastard.
I saw this when I was in the States in October. I completely loved it. I thought Maggie G. was amazing, and Will Ferrell stepped up big time in my book. Emma Thompson was wonderful as the depressive writer, and it was a fresh original movie.
I still tear up when I think of certain lines.
I highly recommend.
I imagined the early repetition to be a representation of the author revisiting her thoughts, editing, etc.
Also, I don’t think the baker ever actually hated him. She hated what he stood for and tortured him for it, but I don’t think she ever hated him personally. So it wasn’t a huge emotional change so much as it was the recognition of him as a whole person rather than the stock character ‘boring government accountant’.
I figured that there wasn’t a way to figure out how to make sure the kid didn’t get hit by the bus unless he saved him.
One thing that confuses me was that I watched the whole movie thinking Harold’s awareness really was part of the book. I didn’t really nitpick the logistics but I didn’t catch on that he was only living out the book during times he could hear the narration. I assumed that he was not supposed to hear the narration at all, but sometimes he did hear it and that was part of the novel. I took it that she was despairing and thought only a tragedy was meaningful and that was why she was blocked and once she started to have the idea of a character being real and actually living she realized there’s meaning in that and didn’t want to kill him. That was why I liked the movie. I liked the way Emma Thompson was going through the process of realizing she didn’t want to continue killing every protagonist. I thought this was her first novel where her character became truly real to her and that was how he magically became real in the world.
I was also surprised anyone would question which song he chose to learn. I figured the reason he wanted to learn guitar was that he had been a big rock fan at some point in his life but had just put that dream away when he grew up into his staid adulthood.
I don’t mean to be completely uncritical but I didn’t have a hard time suspending disbelief because it never occurred to me that he had any independent life story outside the character Emma Thompson created and that was why she jumped out of her pants when the phone really rang.
See, I don’t know why I took it this way – maybe because I’m into writing fiction – but I took this entire movie to be about literary theory. There are SO many jabs at writers it’s hard for me to see it any other way. Dustin Hoffman’s character insisting that Harold has to die for the work to have any meaning – totally a satiric poke at how we garner artistic value from a given work. The whole freaking MOVIE is about this construction of meaning… note Harold trying to figure out if his life is a “tragedy” or a “comedy,” a stab at the artificiality of “genre.” Note Hoffman’s character’s insistence that “Little does he know”, despite being one of the most obvious, stupid clishes in literature, has some kind of profound meaning about the nature of Harold’s “story.” And the discussion at the end about how Harold’s living clearly destroyed the chance of the book having any profound meaning. Or the lamentable fact that the author of the book wasn’t all that great of a writer to begin with.
That movie, IMHO was a big “F**k you!” to literary theory, and a challenge to all of us to examine how we determine something has meaning. I remember walking out of the theatre feeling cheated by the ending–and then realized that was the point.
There is some room for existential messages here too. I am surprised that not one comment takes note of how profoundly, utterly depressed the author was. When she was trying to figure out the best way to kill Harold Crick, she was imagining HERSELF dying. Even Hoffman’s character noted that the author was famous for writing tragedies. The fact that, once she met her character face-to-face (VERY profound moment for anyone who’s ever created fiction, BTW), she realized his character (who was a reflection of HERSELF) was not going to fit into her mental construct of what her writing was all about. She had to allow herself to let go of a dark part of herself and embrace something more hopeful.
And THAT’s the true jab – who says the movie doesn’t have meaning because Harold Crick lived? Obviously, people who fall into narrow patterns of what determines personal value. If you look at the story from the perspective of the writer, you understand that the movie has immense value because it is about personal transformation and refusing to put the story of your life into a “genre.”
IMHO, the movie is about the writer, not Harold Crick.
OT, but the acting in the movie was stellar. The scene were Harold plays the guitar for the girl just floored me. It’s probably one of the most powerfully romantic scenes I’ve ever watched. I wish I could frame that scene and put it on my wall.
{Bump} because I’ve just seen this.
Loved it, loved everything about it from the graphics to Ferrel’s acting to Gyllenhaal’s tattoo and dimples. Saw it with my wife, and we were laughing aloud at several bits, then we were both tearing up at the end. Loved it.