'Stranger Than Fiction' or Why Zach Helm Let Me Down

I really enjoy the movie Stranger Than Fiction. I actually watch it pretty regularly at the moment. Once every few weeks or so. The story is complex for a movie and still intricately woven together so as to not be too complicated or leave too many loose ends.

Everybody in the movie gave an excellent performance. Will Ferrell in particular really delivers with a very subtle and nuanced Harold Crick. The direction, photography, sets and editing were just as good. Over all this movie was almost perfect. There is one small problem.

Every time the movie ends I am frustrated by what the movie could have been. Zach Helm, the writer, has written a beautiful script about a writer of fictional tragedy. She finds out her latest books isn't as fictional as she thought. That when she kills her hero in the end, someone in the real world, living the life she has written, will also die.

The story, with the hero dying in the end, is described as her master piece. Powerful and beautiful. She chickens out because she can't bring herself to knowingly kill someone for her art and because she has come to know and like the real live version of her hero. Her master piece becomes just an OK novel when she changes it so he lives in the end.

Fine. Great. I get the story, and it's a good one. It has a happy ending and we can all walk out of the theater with a smile on our face and a craving for high quality baked goods.

If Zach would have had the balls to write the story where the hero dies in the end. Reveal the wake left by what looks like on the surface the life of an ordinary man; to cause everyone to walk out of that theater devastated by the loss of his hero that he so expertly caused us to fall in love with. That would have been a cinematic master piece to rival the literary one in his movie.

Kevin Smith almost pulled the trigger in the end of Clerks when he didn't earn it. Someone talked him out of it and it saved the end of his movie.

Zach Helm, earned it, but he failed to pull the trigger. Otherwise, the movie might have been depressing. Zach, please grow a pair and don't fail to write the hard story. I don't want to be let down again.