My head has been exploding all week because I’m in that part of the book where I stop futzing around with plot and dialogue and try to make the whole thing work, try to understand the characters who’ve shown up, make sure their actions and their emotions are true and not something left over from an early draft when I was just trying to get them on the page. It’s the time when I panic, every time, because it’s the make-it-or-break-it part of the book, and sometimes I don’t make it. If I’m collaborating, the book gets done anyway, but my characters don’t quite breathe the way I want them to. So Panic Time.
Since Panic Time tends to freeze me in place because I don’t want to go over the edge, I do other things, calming things. Like crochet. And this week, videos. I’d been putting off Stranger Than Fiction for quite awhile but last night it seemed like a good movie for me: I knew there was a scene where Emma Thompson, who plays a novelist, stands on the edge of a building, ready to jump. Perfect.
Warning: There are spoilers in here, BIG ones. Don’t read on if you haven’t seen the movie because the movie is very good and should not be spoiled, and I’m going to talk about the end.
The protagonist of Stranger Than Fiction isn’t Karen Eiffel, Thompson’s character, it’s Harold Crick, who is the protagonist in Karen’s novel who is also real and who suddenly begins to hear her narration in his head. Since Karen writes in third person omnicsicent, Harold doesn’t have much say in his life, he pretty much does whatever she types. That’s disconcerting enough but then he hears her say, in the fine old tradition of the omniscient writer, “Little did he know . . .” and finds out he’s going to die. Harold sets out frantically to find his narrator before she keystrokes him out of his life, and along the way, just as you knew he would, he finds his life. It’s a film that’s amiable to the point of being slow, but everybody does such good work in it that you stick around to watch the actors and appreciate the visuals even if, like Harold, you check your watch now and then.
The slower pace gave me a lot of time to wander around in this movie, and it’s a good movie to wander in visually. I loved the sets here. The IRS offices where Harold works are the neutral cubicles you’d expect, with backlit file rooms that are nicely ominous and 2001, but the fun stuff was in the characters’ homes. Harold lives in a beige apartment, no surprise, but his best friend lives in a great Jetson-retro space that not only fits his sweetly nerdy personality but celebrates it. Harold’s love interest, the gypsy-like Ana, lives in a riot of color and Grandma-retro: crocheted rose-afghans, overstuffed furniture, and bright thirties colors, all jumbled together, the exact antithesis of Harold’s apartment. The one set that threw me as Way Too Symbolic was Karen’s apartment which was evidently designed by Frigidaire, minimalist to the point of emptiness, which works beautifully as a metaphor for writer’s block, but which told me nothing about her as a character since she was clearly not a minimalist person, so it was one place where the metaphor stepped on the character.
The other visual that caught me was the GUI (Graphic User Interface) that was salted throughout the movie, showing in images on the screen how Harold processed the world, counting and estimating things, seeing maps in his head, the visual equivalent of omniscient POV. In a less stylized movie, it would have been distracting, but this is a fantasy, a movie about ideas more than people (although the people are charming) and it fit the cleverness of the concept and made me want to do more of that in my own work. With every book, I get more visually involved–in D&G we’re experimenting with type to see what that does visually for the story on the page–and the pleasures and pitfalls of that approach are clear here: the GUI is delightfully inventive and it tells you a lot about Harold, but it tells, it doesn’t let the actor/character show you through actions. In other words, it’s great for third person omniscient, possibly not so good for third limited, since any futzing with GUI or type says, “Hey, there’s an AUTHOR here, look at this.” The key is to integrate it so completely into the story that the reader/viewer just feels it’s part of that world and doesn’t notice it as an authorial hand, pointing the way.
None of that was a problem in Stranger Than Fiction because it’s so blatantly metaphorical all the way through. When Harold tries refusing to change by never leaving his apartment, a wrecking crew puts a crane into his window and scoops out the living room. In a different movie, this would have been anvilicious, but this entire movie is anvilicious so it works. Harold’s watch as a symbol of both time-as-a-prison and time-as-a-savior isn’t hinted at, the narrator flat out tells you. Ana the Baker’s attempts to explain to Harold that she doesn’t want her tax shortage fixed, that her refusal to pay was a statement/symbol/metaphor, emphasizes Harold’s inability to see the meaning in the metaphors that the movie pelts him with. Even Harold’s best friend’s earnest statement that of course adults can go to Space Camp telegraphs that Harold must believe in Space Camp or be lost to the numbers and Karen’s homicidal typing.
All of this makes for a movie with a very shiny surface that is opaque until the last few minutes; you watch Harold and you sympathize with him but you don’t engage until he goes knowingly to his death. By then the GUI has disappeared because Harold’s living his life, and you see him winding up his affairs, taking care of the people he loves, and you think, “But he can’t die, I like him.” The lit professor Harold goes to for help reads the book and tells Harold that he must die because the book is brilliant, and if he doesn’t die, it will be ruined: Harold must die for Art. Harold reads the book and agrees. And it’s here that the movie turns in upon itself and becomes an even more complex metaphor because Karen stops before she types the last two letters of “dead” and changes the ending from her longhand draft, and Harold lives. It makes the book only “okay” instead of “brilliant,” and it trivializes everything that’s gone before by giving Harold and everyone else in the story a happy ending; if Harold had died for Art, this would have been a tragic little film about how we’re all really pawns in the hands of a great Author and can only try to live our lives to the fullest before the Author types “The End.” Or something like that.
But instead, like Karen, Stranger Than Fiction chooses “okay” with a happy ending instead of “great” with a tragic ending and becomes a big, popular movie that people can enjoy without wanting to cut their throats at the end. It’s not Incisive and Illuminating–that Carpe Diem thing has been around for awhile–nor is it a commentary on the sterility of modern life or our need to break free of the numbers that rule our lives or . . . It’s just this movie about a man discovering that his life has been smothered and trying to do the right thing with his limited imagination and his unlimited sweetness. Ultimately, I think that’s what this movie is: sardonically sweet. It tries to do the right thing within a framework that clearly screams “film-of-ideas” almost stopping its own pulse with aren’t-we-clever writing only to ultimately reject cleverness for heart. The movie makes the same journey that Harold does, and I think that’s brilliant.
I was happy at the end and intrigued by the ideas beneath the Ideas and inspired by the visuals, so I definitely recommend Stranger Than Fiction, but it still remains for me a movie of ideas, not a movie about people. It couldn’t be, no matter how brilliant the actors are at inhabiting this world, because this film has too much it wants to tell you. It’s the curse and blessing of the omniscient narrator: you never get out of the Author’s grasp. So in the end, this is a movie I’ll probably watch again to see exactly how the foreshadowing and the structure worked–which is pretty much standard for me with any story I enjoyed whether it’s film, novel, TV series, graphic novel–and I’ll go back to Stranger Than Fiction in particular because I want to see how the GUI works again, but I won’t go back for the characters or the story, as pleasant as they are. I got the Idea, so I don’t need to.
But it’s a great Idea and well worth a viewing.
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