Stranger Than Fiction

A lonely IRS agent (Will Ferrell) somehow realizes he’s a character in a novel whose writer (Emma Thompson) intends to kill him off. The agent also begins to fall in love with a dissident baker (Maggie Gyllenhaal) whom he’s auditing, and he tries to sort out his author problem by consulting a professor of literary theory (Dustin Hoffman) at a nearby college. Rookie screenwriter Zach Helm’s script strains, without much success, to wed notions out of Pirandello and Fellini to the conventions of romantic comedy. Director Marc Forster and the cast succeed in salvaging some passable entertainment out of all that. But even with the distinctively adult contributions of Thompson and Hoffman, too much of Helm’s synthetic fantasy wreaks of film-school cleverness and undergrad surrealism.