The first filmed screenplay of Zach Helm crowds in on the domain of Charlie Kaufman: a Pirandellian brainteaser about a robotic IRS auditor (Will Ferrell, constrained by catatonia) who discovers he is a character in the work-in-progress of a blocked novelist (Emma Thompson) and is slated to die at the end of it. (A new approach, there, to the standard time-travel and second-sight conundrum: can the foreordained be averted through foreknowledge?) He discovers all this when he, and he alone, starts to hear the voice of the omniscient narrator -- don't ask how or why -- accurately describing his life as he lives it, "but with a better vocabulary," and he then seeks help not from a therapist but from a literary theorist (Dustin Hoffman). The pedantry tends to get in the way of laughs, and the twisted logic sometimes trips up the plot developments (what does the author think she's narrating when her hero is dashing to a phone to dial her own number?), and the voice-over prose samples do not remotely live up to the writer's reputation. Nevertheless, the improbable romance between the inflexible tax man and a civilly disobedient, tropically tattooed baker, currently under IRS scrutiny, is oddly touching, thanks in large part to the touchingly odd line readings of Maggie Gyllenhaal, who can work wonders with an echoic little query like, "You don't like cookies?" And immediately after that, her sensuous recital of the goodies in her early culinary repertoire hovers breathlessly between sheer poetry and utter pornography: "Lemon chiffon cake with zesty peach icing," etc., etc. Directed by Marc Forster. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd
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