By James David Patrick
One doesn’t attend a Will Ferrell movie expecting a thoughtful, low-key morality fable, and maybe that’s why Marc Forster’s 2006 film didn’t connect with moviegoers. As a point of comparison, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, also released in 2006, quadrupled Stranger than Fiction’s box office numbers.
To his credit, Ferrell has a scattered track record of starring in offbeat dramedies such as Everything Must Go (2010) and Downhill (2020); he’s just never committed to a slate of against-type roles like fellow comedians Robin Williams or Jim Carrey. In these few roles, however, he’s proven his dramatic talents rival his gift for broad comedy.
None more perfectly fit his everyman persona than Stranger Than Fiction. He plays Harold Crick, an IRS agent on autopilot. Harold lives in a dull apartment furnished by Ikea and sponsored by the color Spatial White. His life has been broken down to the toothbrush stroke, the step, the minute-to-minute routines he requires to unremarkably exist in the world. One day, Harold hears a woman’s voice in his head, narrating his every move and revealing unflattering personality quirks he’d long ignored. When the narrator foreshadows his certain demise, Harold decides he would like to avoid that, if at all possible.
“But Little Did He Know…”
A shrink (Linda Hunt) diagnoses our protagonist with schizophrenia, a cold, clinical assessment that doesn’t sit well with Harold. The inner voice reveals thoughts and information as if writing a novel, but observations as eloquent as these couldn’t have come from his own mind—because as far as his literary talent, Harold knew he had none.
Zach Helm’s script then becomes more than just a high-concept comic scenario. Harold enlists the help of Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman), a literature professor, to help interpret the meaning of it all. Stranger Than Fiction could have relied solely on Ferrell’s manic reactions to an alien voice inside his head. He’s very funny, but the comedian restrains from relying on easy physical humor and embraces the situational setup.
By approaching Harold’s malady, sincerely and from a literary perspective, Forster’s film becomes an analysis on art and the mental life of the artist – even touching upon the author’s (Emma Thompson) addictions and mental illness. The easiest comparison would be Charlie Kaufman’s script for Adaptation (2002), but where Adaptation skews cynical and suffocatingly clever (in the best possible way), Stranger Than Fiction embraces the uncommon sweetness of small people trying to understand and interpret a mystical intervention in their small lives.
Fiction skews introspective during its final act. In its darkest moments, the film weighs the life of a guy nobody would miss against the value of a timeless masterpiece. Professor Hilbert sums this up perfectly when he says, “Even if you avoid this death, another will find you and I guarantee that it won’t be nearly as poetic or meaningful as what she’s written.” There are moments, like this one, that have an uncommon insight into the human condition. They’re moving and funny, but they’re deftly aware of the fine line they must walk to secure the film’s emotional payoff and stay true to the parameters of the metafictional setup.
“This may sound like gibberish to you, but I think I’m in a tragedy.”
Stranger Than Fiction even works when it probably shouldn’t. The burgeoning romance between the button-down IRS agent and the tattooed baker (Maggie Gyllenhaal) sounds like a match conjured from Hollywood’s worst rom-com tendencies. And yet.
And yet, Harold Crick, despite his off-putting eccentricities, starts to break from his routine and test the limits of his anxieties when he realizes that he’s scripted to die at the hands of an author who murders all of her protagonists. He tries to connect with a woman whose emotional baggage pushes him away. He learns to play guitar. He stops wearing ties. He stops counting brush strokes. As his life literally and figuratively crumbles all around him, he embraces the mess and uncertainty of a life that’s suddenly not his own. As fate descends, he finds agency. He becomes the kind of stable, charming guy that an emotionally damaged woman would find attractive. The coupling of Will Ferrell and Maggie Gyllenhaal feels genuine.
There’s a long tradition of cinematic and literary characters who find a new perspective on life as they face mortality. Those movies span all genres and tones, but it’s the rarest of them all that finds a new approach, a new angle. Stranger Than Fiction shares a thematic kinship with another underappreciated gem: John Patrick Shanley’s Joe Versus the Volcano (1990). A man believes his death is imminent, but instead of dwelling on what he cannot change—he chooses life and love. The rest is outside his control; the rest is up to fate.
In celebrating the 15th anniversary of Marc Forster’s Stranger Than Fiction, I’ve dug into the annals of film history to compile an incomplete historical record of meta-cinematic movies that shatter the fourth wall as an inciting incident. The represented titles span all genres and approaches. Some are more meta than others, but they’re all excellent examples of how to create a work of art that comments on its own artifice from within.
Sherlock, Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924)
Slick camera trickery, genre parody, and one of the earliest explorations of meta-cinema. A deceptively complex silent comedy about an unremarkable film projectionist who pines over a remarkable girl. When a mystery stands between him and certain happiness, he puts on his amateur deerstalker and fails to provide a final solution. He returns to his job, disillusioned, and falls asleep while projecting a movie.
In his dreams, our average guy with below-average sleuthing skills enters the flickering light as a ghostly version of himself, joining the actors in the screen. He becomes capable and confident and the boundary between reality and the dream/movie blurs into one narrative. There’s never been a more perfect metaphor for the film industry as a peddler of dreams. Within the high concept, Buster Keaton delivers a symphony of physical comedy and nuanced deadpan glances.
Minds were blown in 1924—and, best of all, the great and timeless comedy of Buster Keaton still impresses in 2021.
Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)
It should come as no surprise that one of the most cerebral, cinema-literate directors would go on to produce a pitch-perfect noir that’s also inherently a glib, self-aware parody of the studio system.
William Holden stars as Joe Gillis, a struggling screenwriter drawn into the maniacal fantasy world of Norma Desmond, an aging silent film star played by the maniacal, aging silent film star Gloria Swanson. In a stroke of brilliance, Wilder cast Erich von Stroheim, the director of some of Swanson’s most famous roles, as Norma’s devoted butler. Norma even shows Joe an excerpted scene from a real von Stroheim-directed Gloria Swanson film, Queen Kelly (1928), that wasn’t released in the United States until the 1960s. Cecil B. DeMille, the director most credited with making Swanson a star, makes a cameo as himself directing a real film (Samson and Delilah, 1949). Swanson contemporaries such as Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson, and H.B. Warner appear as themselves. Wilder used real, recognizable Los Angeles locations and faces to deftly blur the lines between his fictional narrative and the reality of Swanson’s fading Hollywood star.
Even without pre-existing knowledge of these Hollywood luminaries, Sunset Boulevard works beautifully as a standard noir – gorgeous interplay of the bright Southern California light and the darkness of a star desperately clinging to relevance by any means necessary.
8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)
No list of meta-cinema would be complete without the inclusion of Il Maestro’s masterpiece of floating camerawork and self-analysis. Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) had become a cultural flashpoint – in that moment, a revolutionary piece of cinema that pushed the boundaries of Italian neo-realism to their breaking point. How does a filmmaker follow up a movie that has gone beyond mere success and become a phenomenon? Some have chosen to go smaller, simpler, a non-compete project. Fellini dove inward, stitching together a dreamlike tapestry that lays bare his insecurities with a wry smile.
8½ depicts a famous Italian director, Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni), suffering from “director’s block” on a new science fiction film. His marriage crumbles and he’s losing interest in his in-production film. He temporarily abandons to project to rekindle his artistic fires at a health spa. While luxuriating, a critic pans his work-in-progress, his mistress and his wife pay a visit, the Church abandons him, the crew tracks him down to continue their work, and he begins to have visions of an “Ideal Woman” (played by Claudia Cardinale) who would save the project. As Guido slips deeper in a self-protective fantasy world, he struggles with the meaning and purpose of art and his personal life becomes increasingly indistinct from his fiction.
Over-explaining Fellini’s 8½ strips away some of the magic. I already fear I’ve said too much. Put more succinctly, Fellini’s film depicts the creative process and the life of the public, artistic mind. It’s fantastical and totally raw; the tone shifts wildly as if a direct representation of Fellini’s stream of consciousness. It’s funny and tragic and, quite simply, one of the most beautiful and hypnotic films ever made.
The Last Action Hero (John McTiernan, 1993)
Action films – especially Shane Black-scripted action films – are no stranger to breaches of the fourth wall. James Bond has been doing it since 1969, but none shatter the thing into a million bits quite like John McTiernan’s legendary and divisive cinematic flop, The Last Action Hero.
Upon its release, critics and audiences balked. Pure self-reference apparently didn’t seem so natural 1993. The film’s marketing, which sold The Last Action Hero as a straightforward action comedy, didn’t help foster the proper perspective. Audiences expected one thing – and got something else entirely. But what was it, exactly?
A magic movie ticket transports 12-year-old Danny inside the latest movie from action hero Jack Slater. When the villain of the film borrows the ticket to wreak havoc on the real world, Jack and Danny follow and must figure out how the rules of the cinematic game have been rewritten. Despite tremendous action sequences and a comic-book sense of humor and adventure, no one, it seemed, connected with The Last Action Hero. Unfortunately, the film has been unable to shed the stigma of legendary failure.
I can’t help but think that viewers couldn’t assimilate the film’s Hollywood satire with its love and affection for genre. It’s essentially a schlocky, silly, self-reflexive comic-style actioner that also happens to be smart enough to reference Hamlet, The Twilight Zone, Ingmar Bergman, and eight-time Oscar winner Amadeus (1984) in the same breath as Lethal Weapon (1987) and Die Hard (1988) and conjure a meta-commentary about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s celebrity.
The Last Action Hero didn’t connect with audiences in 1993, but it’s time to grow its cult of appreciation. Even when Shane Black’s script doesn’t quite work, everyone’s trying so hard I can’t fault the effort.
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (Michael Winterbottom, 2005)
Steve Coogan stars as Steve Coogan in this post-modern film about the making of a film adaptation of the post-modern novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, which Laurence Stern wrote between 1759 and 1767 – before the modernist movement had even begun. At its most basic, the novel is Tristram Shandy’s narration of his life story, but its entire reason for existing as a work of literature is that Stern’s distracted narrator almost refuses to tell the story, preferring instead anecdotal asides that take the form of sexual escapades, the value and influence of a name, philosophies of war, and anything else that comes to mind.
It goes without saying, then, that the movie-within-the-movie and Winterbottom’s movie both take this charge of metafictional scatterbrained stasis very seriously and stays to the novel’s ending, which occurs, wouldn’t you know, shortly after Tristram’s birth. What happens isn’t as important as how it happens, the pace with which it happens. Winterbottom and his screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce, relish this opportunity to take a blustery movie nowhere. The filmmakers within the film can’t progress because they can’t get out of their own way. Coogan and Rob Brydon (the same pair of actors that made a metafictional trilogy out of 2010’s The Trip can’t quite haggling over top billing or the color of Brydon’s teeth or the height of the lifts in Coogan’s shoes or whether or not Coogan’s “asparagus” would be stirred in a romantic scene opposite Gillian Anderson, playing Gillian Anderson.
For such an elusive concept, the entire cast proves time and again that they’re game for every ounce of self-reference and effacement. Stephen Fry, Dylan Moran, Jeremy Northam, Kelly Macdonald, and many other familiar faces pass through the listlessly chaotic mise en scene.
Michael Winterbottom’s never been a filmmaker to complete a project by half. (See: The Claim, 24-Hour Party People, The Trip, and Welcome to Sarajevo.) Even something like 9 Songs (2004), which doesn’t work as a film, remains an interesting narrative experiment. He’s become one of the most varied and interesting directors because he’s willing to sincerely embrace an off-kilter concept, and Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story is a Russian nesting doll of concepts made with perfectly executed chaos.
Honorable Mention Double Features
Foreign Meta:
Horror Meta:
Docu Meta:
Too-Clever-By-Half Industry Meta:
James David Patrick is a Pittsburgh-based writer with a movie-watching problem. He has a degree in Film Studies from Emory University that, much to everyone’s dismay, gives him license to discuss Russian Shakespeare adaptations at cocktail parties. He hosts the Cinema Shame and #Bond_age_Pod podcasts. You’ll find him crate diving at local record shops. James blogs about movies, music and ‘80s nostalgia at www.thirtyhertzrumble.com. Follow him on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.