Stranger Than Fiction

I saw this movie tonight. A movie like this is too complex to be condensed into a one-sentence message. But of the movie's many ideas and messages about life, literature, etc., the one I like is this: people's lives often get stuck on certain tracks, and they should take some time to stop, look around, and appreciate the  people around them and the everyday pleasures in life.

The clearest example of this is obviously Will Ferrell's character. At first he's living life on a strict schedule with his head buried in receipts and tax forms and rarely has a chance to find friends or girlfriends, and he eventually learns to loosen up a bit and appreciate the people around him.

But what's most interesting is that other characters learn a similar lesson. Emma Thompson's character, a novelist, is also set in her path -- sitting alone, unreachable to her fans, writing these brilliant yet misanthropic books in which the protagonists always die. To get inspiration for her novel, she goes to an emergency room to observe other people in pain, but realizes that the people there aren't unfortunate enough, and demands to see people who are "not going to make it" -- all the while not displaying a trace of empathy. But once she meets Will Ferrell's character -- the protagonist of her new book -- she realizes that she's been spending too much time thinking about characters and too little time thinking about real life people. In fact, she had treated other people as if they were mere characters. Eventually, she opens up to a friendship with her assistant (Queen Latifah) and in the end she visits a professor (Dustin Hoffman) who's infatuated with her work and always writes to her but never hears back.

Maggie Gyllenhaal's character seems most at peace with appreciating small, everyday pleasures. She gives up Harvard Law School to open a bakery. Someone like me -- because of the career-driven environment  in which I grew up -- is more likely to become a lawyer than a baker. But while watching that scene where Gyllenhaal gives Will Ferrell freshly-baked cookies at the end of his hard day of auditing, baking cookies seems like the noblest profession in the world.

What about Dustin Hoffman's character? What does it mean that he's a life guard at the university pool while Will Ferrell's character actually saves a life? I suppose it underscores the fact that Hoffman's character is in an ivory tower, where people don't die except in the books on their shelves. He analyzes fictional characters and writers who are dead or don't want to talk to him, and doesn't accomplish any heroics or creativity of his own. At first, when Ferrell's character asks him for help, he says he has a busy schedule. But eventually, though his interactions with Ferrell's character, he learns the importance of interacting with real people, and that he can affect real people's lives.

Here's how I relate to these ideas (especially as they relate to Thompson and Gyllenhaal's characters): Sometimes I have ridiculously high ambitions -- ambitions to write amazing movies, plays and TV shows, to write books and essays that express great intellectual ideas, to do this all while making enough money to live in a luxurious apartment and travel the world. And I feel like little things -- going to the grocery store, taking the subway, interacting with shop clerks, charging my cell phone, etc. -- only take time away from time I could be spending my achieving larger career goals.  I have no time to bake cookies. Especially since I tend to believe that I could achieve creative success if only I could devote enough time towards that goal. And any time spent doing other things is only shortening the time in my life that I have to devote to creative endeavors. These are clearly dangerous thoughts, because in the long run, it's not healthy to see so many things in your life as  annoying obstacles standing in the way of your grand ambitions. (Also, the people who know me know that I don't actually put my money where my mouth is and spend that much time writing plays, TV shows, essays, or anything particularly creative).

The fact that the film's director, Marc Forster (who also directed "Finding Neverland," my favorite movie of 2004) and screenwriter, Zach Helm, are have created such a great film, makes their message all the more convincing. They've demonstrated that it's possible to achieve a great creative endeavor -- this film -- while also believing that the little everyday things in life are important. I'm not sure whether Forster and Helm actually conduct their lives that way. But I would imagine Helm does -- there's a Vanity Fair article about Helm, which I haven't read, but apparently it talks about how he wrote a personal manifesto  in which he made various vows: he won't take a job just for money, he won't take a job rewriting someone else's work, etc. I haven't read the article yet, but I would imagine Helm has a pretty well-adjusted life.

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[Mai]

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