These scenes succeed because of the inherent charm of both actors, not because they offer a well-reasoned deconstruction of narrative. It’s textbook literary theory: anybody can think this way if they took the right course. Thompson’s Karen Eiffel, like this film, is a mess.
Here we have an Oscar-winning actress playing a reclusive Pynchonesque writer whose prose sounds no more brilliant than what you'd find in the innumerable pulp paperbacks littering the globe. She seems like the film’s worst creation until Queen Latifah shows up in as an assistant sent by the publisher to ensure the completion of Eiffel’s novel. Latifah’s mainly a mouthpiece for a litany of “Less smoking, more writing” inanities.
Thompson, however, rises above the material and delivers a well wrought portrait of a woman struggling with more than words, even if the screenplay doesn’t call for it; this more or less relegates Latifah to the cinematic dunce corner, where she does even less for the movie. Their scenes are at once both intermittently rewarding and pointlessly maddening: at one point Eiffel is doing “research” on death (and how to kill Harold Crick) in an ER, and when she realizes those gurneyed past her will likely survive, she asks a nurse where the people who won’t live are located. But the scene ends with a broad “You crazy missus” one-liner rather than the embedded black humor.
Farrell’s deft timing is the film’s most rewarding element. He’s able to sell Harold’s transformation from closed-in cipher to exuberant lover/liver despite all the hurdles the screenplay and the director place in his path There’s no logical reason he and Maggie Gyllenhaal -- playing a local baker he's sent to audit -- should have any chemistry at all, much less that which they cook up in their improbable romance. There are at least two too many movies fighting inside , and they all remind the viewer of better movies they’ve seen before.
If the film had hewed close to Harold Crick as long as possible, and stayed away from Karen Eiffel in that space, it may have succeeded in balancing its meta-movie tangents with the warmth of the romance. Ferrell’s charisma can almost make me believe that, no matter how blatantly Marc Forster illustrates the ideas. Ryland Walker Knight is a Seattle-based critic and the publisher of the blog Vinyl is Heavy This is his first article for posted by Jeffrey at 9:00 AM I haven't seen this yet, but I am looking forward to it, and I'm glad we seem to be on the same page regarding Ferrell's talent.
He's formidable -- like a strange hybrid of Tom Hanks and Peter Sellers -- and I really wish he could have played Ignatius Reilly in the aborted screen version of "A Confederacy of Dunces." Pity about Forster laying on the editorializing background music during that apartment-wrecking scene, though. A very TV thing to do.
These scenes succeed because of the inherent charm of both actors, not because they offer a well-reasoned deconstruction of narrative.
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