This film appears, in outline, to be the kind of work that you could imagine being written by Charlie Kaufman or the novelist Nicholson Baker, a jokey self-referential work about creative acts and the minutiae of daily life. Soon, however, it becomes clear that the film is really a romantic comedy with a lugubrious touch. Will Ferrell plays an uptight tax office employee who starts hearing a voice in his head.
He comes to realise that he is a character in a work of fiction being written by Emma Thompson - the voice - who is determining his fate and working out what kind of death scene she will write for him. In the meantime, he has fallen for a woman he is auditing, a bohemian baker (Maggie Gyllenhaal). Ferrell and Thompson weigh things down a little - he is stodgy, she is mannered - but Gyllenhaal and Dustin Hoffman, as an academic who is an expert on the novelist, bring something warm and engaging to the film.
This film appears, in outline, to be the kind of work that you could imagine being written by Charlie Kaufman or the novelist Nicholson Baker, a jokey self-referential work about creative acts and the minutiae of daily life.
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