Stranger Than Fiction (2006)

Harold Crick audits taxes in Chicago, counts his toothbrush strokes, and one morning acquires a narrator. The voice belongs to Emma Thompson, chain-smoking in a bare office, and it has already decided he will die. Marc Forster's film treats this premise with a straight face, which is the correct choice. The jokes land because nobody in the frame finds them funny. Dustin Hoffman's literature professor keeps a small chalkboard of narrative theory and 23 questions about the narrator, supplying the intellectual furniture, and the screenplay names its characters after Crick, Pascal, Eiffel and Hilbert for the amusement of people who notice.

On the ledger of contemporary social conscience, the film is a light entry. Queen Latifah and Linda Hunt appear in supporting roles, and the screenplay does nothing with them beyond letting them act, which was still permitted in 2006. Maggie Gyllenhaal's baker refuses to pay her taxes on principle, and her defiance is framed as charming quirk before it dissolves into a courtship. Emma Thompson's novelist has a career, a deadline and an assistant, and the film grants her professional seriousness, though the story belongs to the man. The Internal Revenue Service takes a few knocks, mostly for being the Internal Revenue Service. Nothing here is argued at length.

The film is finally about acceptance, mortality and the small courtesies that keep people alive, themes that predate the current cultural weather and will outlast it. It does not instruct. It does not scold. It asks the audience to sit with a man who learns his death is beautiful and chooses to walk into it anyway. That is an old-fashioned piece of storytelling, executed with patience. A quiet film, then, and an unremarkable specimen for our purposes, which is its own small mercy.