Spoon “The Book I Write”
Wreckless Eric “Whole Wide World”
Stranger Than Fiction soundtrack at Newbury Comics. (and at iTunes.)

This is a little different.

I want to talk about a movie, Stranger Than Fiction, I saw over the weekend, which is my favorite film this year. I think you should see it too, although maybe this post is more for people who’ve already seen the movie and can tell me how they felt about it.

I’m gonna start with the music and sorta ramble from there.

There will be very, very spoily spoilers that give everything away and will make you sad if yr the kind of person who doesn’t want to know that Vader is Luke’s father before going to see Empire or that the butler did it, etc.

On both counts consider yrselves forewarned.

“Whole Wide World” plays a pivotal role in Stranger Than Fiction. It’s with a cover of this song–naive sentiment, two chugging chords on the acoustic guitar and a shaky, shy voice–that the straight-laced protagonist woos Maggie Gyllenhaal’s radiant crunchy-punk baker, Ana Pascal. It’s one of the sweetest and funniest romantic movie moments I’ve seen.Wreckless Eric has been only a vaguely familiar name to me, but Google says he’s from the Stiff Records roster, placing him in the context of late 70s smart, nervy pub-rock to New Wave stylists like Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe.

It might betray that I respond to Britt Daniel’s music on more of a visceral/emotional level than a critical one, but I’ll go ahead and say that the release of a new Spoon song is always cause for celebration. “The Book I Write” runs over the closing titles of Stranger Than Fiction. It’s by no means a summer-upper of the movie, it’s more of an upbeat send-off to moviegoers who may or may not be wiping away tears.

It strays slightly beyond the Texas indie rockers’ typical stylistic range, coming closer to B. Daniel’s collaboration with emo wunderkind Conor Oberst of a few years back. It’s, dareIsay, B**tlesesque pop. Or it falls within the genre of others who attempt such, etc.

I’m not even sure the song addresses the movie’s concerns. But, in a fashion less inscrutable than normal for B. Daniel, “The Book I Write” addresses the artistic urge–across media and genres, really. Expression in search of audience. Figuring out life by making something. Embracing uncertainty and cultivating empathy.

But maybe I’m just in the target demographic of the song, and the movie.

Stranger Than Fiction, an entertainment I thought would be light and quirky, mowed me right the fuck down, left me simpering and dazed.

It’s already been described, in more than one place, as Charlie Kaufman-lite. The hook, for me, was the metanarrative elements. I liked the idea of a fictional character made flesh, here funnymanchild Will Ferrell as accountant Harold Crick, hearing the narration of his life and ultimately seeking a meeting with his creator, Emma Thompson as reclusive, racked literary heavyweight Kay Eiffel.

(I want to pause here to acknowledge that there’s probably a dissertation to be written about the character-names in Stranger Than Fiction. I’m already desperately overreaching in this post, so I won’t be the one to write it.)

This plot via pomo blurring of boundaries should already ring bells that say Adaptation, Being John Malkovich. As mediator between worlds, Dustin Hoffman appears as Professor Jules Hilbert, a role cut from the same cloth as his “existential detective” turn in I Heart Huckabees. Add in the comedian taking a reined-in dramatic turn, and yr thinking Punch-Drunk Love, Eternal Sunshine, right?

Stranger Than Fiction lived up, or down, to these expectations–in a fashion entirely enjoyable–up till the movie’s turn: a sentence that begins, “Little did he know,” and ends, “his imminent death.”

Another chance to tune out here if you hate the overly dramatic emo diary elements of this blog.

Still with me? OK.

My biggest fear is death. I don’t think this makes me unique. I’m pretty sure, though, that mine is kinda “moreso” than yrs, if yr a functioning young adult. I feel like a big baby, a freak, for having borderline panic attacks, going as far back as kindergarten, about the concept of mortality.

I think I floated through my teens and most of my 20s without it being too big a deal, just an occasional moment of terror. But in recent years there are weeks at a time when it’s a near-constant preoccupation in the back of my mind.

So throw aside the meta/quirk blah blah–a character desperate in the face of impending death hits a bit close to home. This happens in movies all the time, but Crick’s dilemma foregrounded the issue of mortality in a way that’s only seen in weepers about cancer patients like Dying Young. You couldn’t pay me to watch that type of movie. Schmaltz cheapens something that’s, uh, dead serious to me.

Last chance to check out, folks. I want to talk about the ending of Stranger Than Fiction.

Crick is ultimately granted the chance to read the manuscript that spawned him and will end him. His fate is sealed, his story a tragedy rather than comedy. Hilbert has already urged him to accept his death for the sake of art–according to him, Eiffel’s book, Death and Taxes, is a Great Work of Literature.

But Crick makes up his own mind, coming to the conclusion that he must face his death willingly. His existence, he decides, will be ennobled by art, and by sacrifice for the sake of another–he is to be hit by a bus while throwing a young boy clear of the machine’s path. He does some last good deeds, even absolves Eiffel, and all goes forward as destined.

Maybe I was manipulated to feel so, but I was moved. I felt almost like I was learning something about the futility in rebelling against the inevitable, about the nobility of meeting the greatest uncertainty with inner peace.

Or so it seems. And this is where the movie fucked with me twice over.

I was already in tears as the camera pulled back on the tableau of Crick’s broken body, the boy and bus driver being consoled. Then, it turns out that Eiffel rewrote to save his life–Crick’s in traction, Ana falls even deeper in love with him for his heroism…

I felt utterly betrayed in that moment.

Then we get Eiffel visiting Hilbert, perhaps her greatest admirer, and letting him in on the alteration. He doesn’t mask his disappointment that she’s compromised her book by yielding up a happy ending.

So are the filmmakers covering their asses, winking at the audience?

Eiffel offers a justification–by facing his death willingly, for art or to save another life, Crick showed himself to be exactly the kind of person who deserves to keep on living.

Maybe I should be ashamed to say that I bought this, although part of me is still dubious.

Another part of me is thankful to the filmmakers that they put me through the paces, but still gave me some redemption, pulled back from the pitch-black sad end.

I walked out of the theater drained, elated, confused… A fucking mess.

But that night, the next day, all the way to today, I can contemplate the end to my solipsistic little petty existence without screaming up at my mute, possibly absent, narrator and author, without raging at the unfairness to give us–me–so much to love, only to guarantee a full stop in the murky future. I feel calm.

It might be a great sign for the movie, or just an awful sign for my emotional maturity, but my life is better for having seen Stranger Than Fiction.