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Stranger than Fiction is an imaginative romantic comedy with decent chemistry between the two leads - the always reliable Will Ferrell, and Maggie Gyllenhaal, playing against type.

Harold Crick is an IRS auditor whose solitary life is governed by his own predictable routines. Things start to change however when he begins to hear a voice in his head. He begins to take risks for the first time in his life and starts a romance with Ana Pascal, a fiery baker he is supposed to be auditing. But all is not well, for little does he know that the voice is planning to kill him.

Fortunately for Harold this is not a schizophrenic episode; rather he learns that the voice he hears is a reclusive novelist, played by Emma Thompson, who is narrating his life story as she writes her latest book. The precise mechanism by which this unlikely plot device works is never explained, but the two characters are both living and breathing people in the same universe. Luckily, Dustin Hoffman's literature professor is on hand to help everybody pretend this all makes sense.

The love plot is warm hearted. The framing device is bonkers. Not because of the implausibility of the premise, but because no concession is made as to why the novelist would even be writing about Harold Crick and his initially dull life to begin with. There is no Charlie Kaufman moment where she decides to write herself into the story of her version of "The Orchid Thief". There's an even bigger problem too. As the characters agonize over how beautiful the intended ending supposedly is to the book, and whether this means that Harold Crick ought to die for the sake of great literature, none of them seem to notice that the last few scenes of the screenplay nearly render the film they're all starring in a complete turkey.

Perhaps somebody's twin sister should have showed up in the final act with a fast car and a gun and tickets to go and watch Synecdoche, New York, with Philip Seymour Hoffman, not Dustin.

Although the film is likeable, it does have a few structural problems, and it fails to rival the cleverness of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Adaptation. Its strengths are Ferrell and Gyllenhaal's characters, and Hoffman and Thompson's performances, but everybody might be better off just waiting for the next Charlie Kaufman movie to hit the cinemas, in early 2009.

Also starring Queen Latifah.

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