I think Marc Forster‘s Stranger Than Fiction (Columbia, 11.10), which preemed at the Toronto Film Festival over the weekend, is maddening in its lack of clarity — its inability to make simple unified sense of all the strands.
But there’s no one correct way of seeing it. Emmanuel Levy is calling it “a moral fable, a wake-up call for all [who] would like to change our story. The movie touches on a universal fantasy , the notion that we have inner voices in our heads that tell us what to do and how to be.”
What Will Ferrell‘s Harold Crick character “discovers in the midst of the film’s incredible events is how to escape all that and really begin to enjoy his existence. All of the characters, including Harold’s wristwatch, end up doing little but significant things to help save one another, underlying the theme that the people and things we take most for granted are often the ones that make life worth living and actually keep us alive.”