Little did I know...

Stranger than Fiction is a cute movie with a clever premise and enjoyable performances. It doesn't quite reach the inspired heights of eloquent quirkiness of its genuine Kaufman predecessors, but it's engaging and pleasant throughout. It’s quite clever at times, especially in its charming, graphics-laden visuals (why aren’t such devices used more often outside of commercials), but mostly it’ the sort of fine-but-not-fantastic film that I wish were the standard in romantic comedies. Instead, they’re rather rare, meaning that when we get them, some critics tend to get carried away.

The biggest problem with the film is the one that Kaufman's films always bump into but overcome: what to do with a semi-blank, inwardly-focused, downer of a protagonist. In Kaufman's films, the melancholy male lead is always meant to represent Kaufman (or, in Adaptation, actually be him), so he doesn't give the characters much in the way of specifics. In Adaptation, Nicholas Cage's Kaufman character was a nicely played but still fairly vague collection of undeveloped neuroses and banal longings for fulfillment in work and relationships. In Eternal Sunshine, the Jim Carey character was a total blank other than his nervous, shy-guy demeanor. The only thing we actually knew about him was that he was a cartoonist. Being John Malkovitch featured the most dynamic of the bunch, but even there, Cusack's character basically boiled down to just another struggling artist looking for love.

Kaufman gets around this problem a number of ways: he clearly deploys his leads as creatively-inclined everymen, inviting male viewers to fill in the blanks of his leads with their own lives. And he surrounds those characters with an array of eccentric, finely-detailed supporting characters and--more importantly--driven, passionate female leads that build a lot energy and interest on their own as well as add a little electricity to the male leads simply by giving them something so lively and desirable to chase after.

Stranger than Fiction gives us a perky, attractive female lead in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s baker, and she carries most of her scenes rather effectively, doing a lot with fairly minimal material. But the other supporting characters are watchable mostly because of the excellent performances by Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson and, yes, even Queen Latifa. Hoffman's coffee drinking, never mentioned in the dialog, was, I suspect, his own invention, and Thompson was positively born to play disheveled, cynical intellectual types.

In the end, this is not quite enough to offset the total emptiness of Will Ferrell’s Harold Crick. I know the blankness was intentional—the sterile, repetitive, monotone sets at his home and office are designed to emphasize this trait—but it just doesn’t make for a terribly compelling protagonist. He’s got decent if somewhat generic goals (get the girl, stop the author from killing him), but with so little to the character, it’s tough to make his approach to achieving those goals all that interesting. It’s not that it comes off particularly bad, just that it feels, well, kind of empty and wanting--in other words, just like Crick.