Everyone has had that moment in their life when they feel like they feel like they’re living in a movie. Sure, belief in cosmic and/or spiritual forces explains the feeling for a majority of folks, but sometimes it seems like a day’s events are put together by a mind much too twisted to be a benevolent higher power. In Stranger than Fiction, Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) can’t shake that feeling when, in the middle of his boring, by-the-numbers life, he begins to hear a female voice in his head. And it’s not the kind of voice that tells him what to do or predicts his next move. The voice is very eloquently narrating his life. It sounds like a can’t-miss premise, but there are plenty of places where Stranger than Fiction could misstep. The most satisfying part about watching it, then, is that it’s executed with such poise that, almost everywhere it could go wrong, it doesn’t.

The voice narrating Harold’s life is Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson), a respected author who has lived as a recluse for nearly a decade and is struggling to finish off her latest book by finishing off its protagonist, a blase IRS agent named…Harold Crick. When Harold realizes that his life is being co-opted for publication, and that Eiffel intends to off him, he enlists literary expert Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman) to figure out how he might be able to wrest control back from the omniscient narrator.

Harold’s most significant barometer on whether or not he’s being written into a comedy (in which he’ll wind up married) or a tragedy (in which he’ll wind up dead) is his interaction with Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a hipster baker who Harold is sent to audit. She is very reasoned in her tax evasion and loathes what Harold stands for, but feels for the man himself. They fall for each other, but it doesn’t seem to remove the sword of Damocles from over his head. As the book nears its end, Harold takes the audience on a tense examination of how much control one can take in his life.

Stranger than Fiction succeeds because it neither takes itself too seriously nor too lightly. There are plenty of opportunities to laugh heartily - after all, when a crane demolishes Harold’s apartment or Ferrell does his trademark insane scream as Harold curses the voice in his head, you can’t help but guffaw - but director Mark Forster and rookie screen writer Zach Helm pace the story perfectly.

Ferrell is given the responsibility of carrying this pace without breaking into any of his myriad manic characters, and he does a wonderful job. He’s measured, loveable, and relatable, proving to anyone that has seen Winter Passing that he does have some dramatic chops after all. Thompson plays her character realistically, refraining from making Eiffel a caricature of a writer by giving her just the right amount of humanity to accompany the frazzled haze she’s stuck with because of her writer’s block. Gyllenhaal plays a great romantic target for Harold; under the tough-as-nails anarchist, there’s an adorable, sweet girl. Hoffman barely exerts an acting muscle and still comes out as the king of understatement. Queen Latifa stays out of the way in her supporting role as an assistant sent by Eiffel’s publishers to strong arm her into finishing the book, and Tony Hale adds quirky comic moments as Harold’s only friend, a fellow auditor.

With a smart script that can drive its own plot while still acting as a piece of metafiction, Stranger than Fiction is a thoroughly enjoyable movie that can only be undone by its ending, a fact that Hoffman’s character recognizes when he reads it in Eiffel’s draft. Even so, the journey is worth taking no matter what you think of what you see in the end.

Rating: * * * * of 5

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