by MALCOLM FRASER

Director Marc Forster continues his odd career (Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland, Stay) with this clever comedy. Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is an IRS auditor with seemingly no interests besides an OCD-like tendency to catalogue and count his everyday activities. One day, he begins to hear an English woman’s voice in his head, describing just these activities. This is annoying enough as it is, until the voice mentions his upcoming death. Ferrell then embarks on a quest to find out just who the mysterious narrator is, meanwhile getting romantically involved with his audit victim Ana (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a leftist pastry chef.

The voice, as we’ve already found out, belongs to novelist Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson), who’s writing Harold as a character in a book she’s been trying to finish for years. Her publisher dispatches no-nonsense assistant Penny (Queen Latifah) to help get the novel completed, making it timely for Ferrell to intervene and prevent his own demise.

The cast is uniformly strong. Ferrell, who’s been indulging his goofy side lately, reminds us here that he can also play a sympathetically human character. Gyllenhaal is sweet and spirited as Ana (plus there’s the small pleasure of hearing someone spout left-wing rhetoric in a Hollywood comedy). Thompson is compelling in the role of the neurotic writer, which could easily have been a caricature. And Dustin Hoffman turns up in a small but great role as a literature prof who helps Ferrell try to solve his mystery.

The astute observer will have detected a strong whiff of Charlie Kaufman in the story concept. The script, by newcomer Zach Helm, poaches liberally from Kaufman’s strongest work: the parallel-universe notion of Being John Malkovich and the metafictional vibe of Adaptation are obviously present, and the genuinely bittersweetness of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is echoed in the romance between Ferrell and Gyllenhaal.

It’s not quite as cerebral or daring as Kaufman, and despite the literary pretensions, Thompson’s voice-over prose flows more like a TV commercial than a novel: ultimately, Helm and Forster can’t quite bring themselves to break out of Hollywood convention. It might have been a braver film if they had, but it’s still refreshingly smart, unpredictable and enjoyable.

Stranger Than Fiction opens this Friday, Nov. 10

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