What an imaginative and touching story! Marc Forster's "Stranger Than Fiction", written by Zach Snyder, is a movie that could have failed in so many aspects despite its creative premise, yet the story confidently moved forward, punctuated by clever, poignant and thought-stirring twists.

And Will Ferrell's performance is integral to the film's success because he plays a nuanced and extremely restrained character who contradicts the very comical premise of the film, as soon as we think this is going to be a fantasy-farce. This is even more pleasantly surprising as Ferrell is like the Bill Murray of his generation, a SNL alumni used to madcap comedies where he plays eccentric and one-liners-throwing characters. Here, he is Harold Crick, a meek and discreet IRS agent who lives under a steady routine guided by an electronic wristwatch.

The opening voice-over narration insists that nothing special ever happened to Harold Crick... for the simple reason that he's the one controlling his life and saw no reason whatsoever to make this change. He's no Truman Burbank or "Fight Club" Narrator; he likes the minimalist scope he gave to his life for twelve years (from his Spartan house to his by-the-book ethics). But who said we've got to make our own existential crisis? One day, a voice starts narrating Crick's thought as he's brushing his teeth, there's something literary in the disembodied (female) voice he hears, Cricks stops brushing his teeth, starts again, and then the voice describes his feeling at that point. We get it, it's the story of a character who hears the narrator, and this premise is exciting enough.

But there are reasons I mentioned Bill Murray or Jim Carrey in this review, "Stranger Than Fiction" feels like one of these clever concept movies ("Groundhog Day" or "The Truman Show") but Ferrell plays the protagonist differently than Bill Murray as Phil Connors, and even Jim Carrey managed to be comical at times like giving a wink to the audience who needed at least one funny grin. Ferrell doesn't surrender to comedy no matter how comedic his situation gets, he plays his character as if something serious, like an illness, was happening. And this is a revelation, a proof that any actor, given the right story and direction, can go beyond the preconceived limits of his acting range. Adam Sandler gave me a similar impression in "Click" but the film wasn't as consistently good.

"Stranger Than Fiction" never takes its originality for granted. The narration is only the starting point, we only hear it during crucial times, and it starts being a problem when the narrator is revealed to be omniscient, and explains that a simple act Crick just committed will lead to his imminent death. It is not the word 'death' that provokes a sudden outburst of angst, but 'imminent', tragedy material. When a voice that knows everything about you or your most hidden thoughts tells you that you're going to die, well, even the most Cartesian and sensible man will be likely to believe it.

Crick goes to a psychiatrist played by Linda Hunt, she diagnoses a case of schizophrenia but suggests him to ask a literature professor. Within the twisted premise of the story, this is implacably logical, so Crick goes to Pr. Hilbert, played by Dustin Hoffman. Detached and rational, Hilbert gives him homework. Crick must determine whether he is a comedic or tragic character, one that is governed by the continuity of life or the inevitability of death. Crick must test whether he controls his storyline (or not, like a tragic character) and then tries to do whatever he wants, if his death is so inevitable. At that point, we already forgot about the narrator, and the film gets closer in themes and tone to Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman's masterpieces.

Indeed, "Stranger Than Fiction" made me realize why self-referential movies are so fascinating, they have something inherently human behind entertaining plots. And the core of the story is the sweet romance between Crick and a free-spirited tattooed tax-rebel baker played by Maggie Gylenhall. When he starts auditing her, you feel the attraction, but he can't reach her heart because he's stuck up to his job, and it takes time for him to finally allow her to reach him. The chemistry feels real as there's something authentic in their performances, Ana loves what she does, and Harold, governed by the necessity to give a meaning to his seemingly meaningless life, starts doing what he loves: playing guitar, developing friendship, pleasing himself.

Ultimately, Ana falls in love with him and Crick thinks he might be in a comedy, until he finally sees the face behind the voice, it's author Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson) who seems to be the one pulling the strings. The trick is that she always kills off her lead characters, and the trickiest part is that Crick's life is only depending on whether she decides to kill him off or not. She shares her mental block with her editor's employee (Queen Latifah) wondering about the perfect way to kill Crick, until she realizes that he exists. The film escalates to the level of mind-bending genius (a word that has been so overused for the likes of "Inception") when she gives Crick the manuscript. Hilbert reads it and considers it a masterpiece with his death being part of that greatness. And Crick reads it and agrees.

It all comes down to a simple question: should one die just because it makes a terrific ending? This is one of the greatest narrative tricks ever pulled on screen and an existential lesson. Crick gave his meaningless life a meaning (wasn't he laughing at "The Meaning of Life" in the theater?). Maybe life can be less flashy than its dramatized version, yet as 'disappointing' as the ending was story-wise, it was deeply moving and touching in the way we connected it to our reality… and a little bit to fiction.

What if you only realised the importance of your life only days before you lost it? Even knowing when or how you will die (not such a fatuous idea with the completion of the Genome Project) raises difficult questions about how much we really want to know about ourselves.

Such a theme is usually simplified and subsumed into religious-based tales such as It's a Wonderful Life, but taken as an idea in its own right it has considerable intellectual weight. Harold Crick finds himself the main character in a story as it unfolds, but his annoyance quickly shifts gear as he is aware of the author saying, "Little did he know . . . it would lead to his imminent death."

Not the mindless comedy that the trailer suggests, Stranger Than Fiction is a precise and fairly cerebral story where the laughs stem more from individually appreciating certain aspects of its cleverness rather than any contrived humour.

The surface story is of a man who lives a humdrum if 'successful' life and is awakened to a more three dimensional existence by falling in love. The additional elements will either delight or annoy. IRS auditor Crick (Will Ferrell) starts hearing a voice in his head. It is that of Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson),a famous author. She describes exactly what he is doing but with a rather better vocabulary than he possesses. When she announces his imminent death, he takes drastic steps to meet her and persuade her to change the ending of her novel.

The characterisation, casting and acting is spot-on. Thompson is at her most refreshingly deranged as the harassed and reclusive author. With a literary equivalence of method acting, Eiffel balances on the edge of her desk trying to imagine the thoughts of someone about to make a suicide jump. She sits in the freezing drizzle watching cars cross a bridge to imagine an accident. Her rants at her 'editorial assistant' (who uses more traditional methods of accessing imagination) give a convincing insight into the creative process. While the voice in Crick's head is stereotypical Thompson, the fuller, isolated character, when we meet her, is a minor revelation. "I don't need a nicotine patch," she declaims angrily to her assistant. "I smoke cigarettes."

Maggie Gyllenhaal, as law drop-out turned baker Ana Pascal, sparkles, glows and is sexily alluring and radiant with passionate love of life - and she manages to light up the screen faster than, say, even Juliette Binoche in Chocolat. Dustin Hoffman has the least challenging of the main parts, but he endows his character (an eminent professor of literature) with the gravitas needed to take ideas of literary interconnectedness seriously. Will Ferrell gives a remarkable break-out performance in a straight role, reminiscent of Jim Carrey in The Truman Show. He is superbly suited to the part as audiences expect him to be a shallow comedy character and here he is trying the find the substantial person inside himself. Most of the audience are concentrating so much on the film's intricate hypothesis and how it is worked out, that only afterwards do we realise what a range of emotions Ferrell has to portray with complete seriousness.

Novelist Kay Eiffel (Thompson) anthropomorphises things like Crick's watch (similarly the official website says, in real time, "As the cursor waited anxiously for the site to load, it couldn't help but feel an overwhelming sense of elation.") We sense a life-imbuing process that might even be likened to what an actor does with his character; but the film goes a stage further by drawing a similarity with the essentially lifeless, clockwork existence of the IRS auditor whose only escape is discovering love with Pascal. His quest is aided by fictional plot analysis from Professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman) and of course begs the question, what is fiction?

Director Marc Forster showed consummate skill in portraying the positive escapism of JM Barrie's creative Peter-Pan-writing in Finding Neverland. With Stranger Than Fiction, he has teamed up with brilliant new dramatist Zach Helm. Helm is fascinated with the writing process in what he calls a larger Post-Modern movement. "From Pirandello, to Brecht, to Wilder, to Stoppard, to Woody Allen to Wes Anderson, we can see the progression of a contemporary, self-aware, reality-bending and audience-involving wave in dramatic literature," he says. "I love to see Homer Simpson reacting to his creator, Matt Groenig, or the cast of 'Urinetown' complaining from the stage about their own title."

Even the street names, business names, and the characters' last names of Stranger Than Fiction are significant – Crick, Pascal, Eiffel, Escher, Banneker, Kronecker, Cayly, etc. are all puns on mathematicians who focused on the innate order of things. The invitation is to ask what is beyond the symmetry of things.

Stranger Than Fiction meets even its most formidable challenge - making the ending nail-biting and moving after such surreal content. But the ultimate message of the film seems a little trite if it is supposedly coming from a groundbreaking author. Like the glimpses of Eiffel's book, we are given impressive mountains of style but little substance. As the film doesn't press the strengths forcefully by admitting in so many words what it is getting at, there is a chance you may not bother with the subtleties - in which case it adds up to very little.

A superb testament to inventiveness and worthy of awards in many different categories, Stranger Than Fiction somehow falls short of being a masterpiece.

I have been very surprised recently that I have actually enjoyed several Will Ferrell movies. Why surprised? Well, to put it bluntly, most films made by ex-Saturday Night Live performers have been pretty wretched (though there are some exceptions) and I usually avoid them like the plague. With films like DR. DETROIT, NEIGHBORS, A NIGHT AT THE ROXBURY, FUNNY FARM, BEST DEFENSE, HERE'S PAT, etc., it's easy to understand my misgivings. However, despite my strong bias, I must admit I really enjoyed TALLADEGA NIGHTS as well as STRANGER THAN FICTION--though they are both very, very different movies.

While TALLADEGA NIGHTS is extremely silly and a great parody, STRANGER THAN FICTION is not exactly a comedy, though it has some nice comedic moments. Instead, it's a fantasy, comedy and romance all rolled into one and it was nice to see Ferrell finally underplay a role. His character was extremely obsessive-compulsive and emotionally constricted--yet this was NOT played for laughs--an excellent decision.

The film initially seems a lot like the old skits on "The Carol Burnett Show" which featured a writer typing a story and you saw actors playing it out as if they were real. However, the simple story idea was drawn out but didn't seem padded and offered some lovely insights into deeper philosophical issues. It was NOT a film for dopey teens or an undemanding audience, but a thoughtful and intelligently constructed film that caught my interest.

If you are looking for screwball comedy or lots of laughs, then you will no doubt be disappointed. However, if you watch the film with few preconceptions and expectations and have an open mind, I am sure you'll enjoy the film. It's nice to see that I was wrong about the film and the "SNL curse" did not seem to apply.