While the topic of the novel and the novelist do not necessarily seem like the most cinematic of topics, many filmmakers have sought to dramatize the solitary pursuit of fiction-writing. These films often look to portray the "tortured writer," an archetype of an eccentric author facing a creative roadblock who must find their writerly voice through engaging more readily with the world of the living (or else perishing because of their pathos). Stranger than Fiction is a film that repeats the archetype of the tortured author, seeking to show the author's redemption and dramatize the difficulties and idiosyncratic habits of a tortured artist.
As Elisabeth Donnelly writes, prefacing a list of the best Hollywood films about writers, "Hollywood is famous for its treatment of writers. They are the low man on the totem pole, the person banned from the set, the guy who wrote the Great American novel drinking himself to death in Los Angeles, rewriting dumb scripts. It’s funny, as Hollywood—along with movies around the world—is obsessed with portraying “writers” on screen, which is a weird profession to lionize as writing is the least visually pleasing job of all." Hollywood has taken on famous and known writers—Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath in Sylvia, Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf in The Hours, Leonardo DiCaprio as Rimbaud in Total Eclipse—and devised fictional writers—Jon Turturro as Barton Fink, Ethan Hawke as Jess in Before Sunset, and Emma Thompson as Karen Eiffel in Stranger than Fiction. These characters represent a broad range of writers, yet the image is often consistently of a person either willfully or unintentionally cut off from society, an eccentric or a misfit.
As Roger Rosenblatt writes in an article for The New York Times, "Most films about the writing life are more accurate, because writers write them. And rarely is the writer shown as successful, triumphant or—are you kidding?—happy."
