I don’t think Sarah and Zack noticed, but I got pretty choked up at Stranger Than Fiction. Harold Crick, of course, is intended to be Everyman in his purest form: so completely bland, with such universal bad habits, and played so sympathetically that it’s simply impossible not to project ourselves onto his blank canvas. That’s not criticism. Think about how great an accomplishment this is. The movie seeks to engage people like Harold – utterly disconnected from the people and the world around him – and remind them that they are, in fact, human beings. For the Ana Pascalls among us, the movie reminds us how much courage those first steps into the world take.
And now I realize it’s a movie starring an SNL comic and that girl who did the babysitter voice-over in Monster House.
But that doesn’t change the fact that I almost cried at Will Ferrell’s acoustic version of “Whole Wide World.”
Today’s Musical Insight (Collegiate Harold Crick Edition):
“Twenty years – it’s breaking you down, now that you understand there’s no one around.”
