Rhapsodies

Because we just got through text times I decided to do films involving members of the IRS as protagonists. After all, this time of year can’t be easy for them either…. They’re only human after all… Yes, really!

First on this list was one that I’d known about for a while, but hadn’t taken very seriously, Marc Forster’s Stranger Than Fiction starring Will Ferrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah, and Emma Thompson. We are first introduced to IRS auditor Harold Crick (Ferrell) by an omniscient narrator who tells us he is a repressed individual who schedules everything and plans his whole life around his watch, counting his brushstrokes and steps to work. One day, however, he becomes aware of this narration. Eventually, we learn the narrator is novelist Karen Eiffel  (Emma Thompson) who is writing her latest novel, of which Harold is her main character. A story which will ultimately lead to his death.

When I first saw the trailer for Stranger Than Fiction I, like many other people thought that it would be just another Will Ferrell comedy with him going crazy over the narration and Emma Thompson as a cool disinterested God. Once I watched it turned out to be something much more subtle. Almost to the point where I’m reluctant to consider the film a comedy. Karen is shocked when she finds out that she is mystically manipulating a man’s life. And Ferrell is almost tragic as he ultimately decides to accept his fate but at the same time learns how to live.

If I had any problems with it I almost wish that the scenes with Karen, and her assistant Penny, played by Queen Latifah, had equal time.

Thompson is wonderful as a frustrated and eccentric creator. And Queen Latifah is brilliant as the person who has to put up with it.

The next film on my list, George Marshall’s The Mating Game, a very loose adaptation of the novel The Darling Buds of May by H. E. Bates, tells the story of the Larkins, a highly eccentric family living an idyllic farm life in rural Maryland who well liked by their community, except their very rich neighbor. After Pa Larkin  (Fred Clark)“borrows” his prize boar to stud with the Larkin Sow he finally takes action by calling in some favors in the treasury siccing the IRS on them. This comes in the form of Lorenzo Charlton, played by Tony Randall. who is tasked to look into the Larkin’s finances. Lorenzo quick discovers that Pa Larkin has never filed an income tax claim, mainly because the Larkins technically don’t have any income, having been mostly self-sufficient for three generations and getting whatever else they needed by trading

In the process, Pa considers Lorenzo, who he quickly renames Charley, as possible husband material for his oldest daughter, the vivacious and irrepressible Mariette, played by then Debbie Reynolds, and does everything he can do to slow down Charley’s investigation. Not so much as to interfere with the audit, as to give Charley a chance to get to know the family.

As Charley tries to make heads or tails out of the families convoluted “records“ he and Mariette begin to hit it off. And he takes a liking to the rest of the family as well. But can Charley help them before his bosses come checking on him?

I’m not sure what I thought of this movie. On the plus side, you can’t help liking the Larkins and their wonderful utopian lifestyle that I suspect no longer existed even when this film was made. In a strange kind of way they kind of remind me of a cross between the Clampetts and the Addams Family, where they’re not actually being rebellious, they are just genuinely oblivious that they’re doing anything wrong.

The problem is that the rest of the film is complete fluff. I find myself wanting to spend more time with the Larkins… just not in this movie… This definitely makes me want to go the three seasons worth of the BBC’s television version of The Darling Buds of May.