DVD review
Directed by Marc Forster
Starring Will Ferrell, Maggie Gyllenhall, Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah, Emma Thompson
Release date 2 April 2007

“This is a story about a man named Harold Crick... and his wristwatch. Harold Crick was a man of infinite numbers, endless calculations and remarkably few words. And his wristwatch said even less.”

Stranger than Fiction writer Zach Helm plays at ‘Being Charlie Kaufman’ in this meta-narrative tragicomedy.

Ferrell is Harold Crick - an IRS auditor whose life is composed of routines, rituals and numbers. While cleaning his teeth with customary ablution, chaos impinges on Harold's carefully ordered life - a voice pre-empts his thoughts and drops a casual hint about his imminent death. The voice belongs to famed novelist Karen Eiffel (Thompson), who after 10 years of writer’s block is nearing completion of her latest book. She just needs to decide how to kill off her main character – Harold Crick.

Channelling the juxtaposition of reality and fantasy whilst playing up anguished neuroses, there are various similarities to Peter Weir’s Truman Show, and Kaufman’s scripts.

But there’s a fine line between being quirky, and being dramatically aimless. Unlike a good work of fiction, the film’s structure is weak and its themes incongruent. It is unfortunate that, while Helm brings forth interesting questions regarding the relationship between reader and author, he fails to answer them.

Ferrell’s low-key performance fails to hold events together, and suggests that he should stick to elves, anchormen and evil fashion designers.

Strangest of all, perhaps, was the misplaced judgement that we would find Queen Latifah convincing in the role of Eiffel’s intelligent and no-nonsense publishing assistant. That’s just plain weird.

Extras consist of five fairly standard featurettes and deleted scenes. Natalie Barnes

VERDICT: 5/10
Is Eiffel merely transcribing the events of Harold Crick’s life, or is she actually determining them as she writes? Is Harold Crick a literary creation, or has he become a psychotic manifestation of his own loneliness? Who cares? Not me.