A misfit.

OURS is an age of big-man comedy--of giant doofuses, six-foot-plus oafs with bobbing, oversized heads, who thrive on a devastating combination of size and silliness. In the 1980s, this was Bill Murray's metier; now it belongs to Vince Vaughn, to Sacha Baron Cohen of Borat fame, and of course to Will Ferrell, the funniest big man of them all.

Ferrell is the archetypal innocent American: a giddy man-child, sweet and vulgar all at once, klutzing his way through life and spreading well-meaning chaos in his wake. In his Saturday Night Live days, he effortlessly parodied the tongue-tied side of George W. Bush; since then, he's taken on all the cliches of American masculinity, from overgrown frat boys and '70s newscasters to NASCAR drivers and soccer dads, skewering them and celebrating them in equal measure.

There is something in a comedian, though, that pines always for respectability, for critical acclaim and Oscar statuettes. Sometimes this pining is fulfilled--think of Murray, who's aged into a critical darling by playing variations on a melancholic theme, or Tom Hanks, who made an effortless leap from comic goof to Jimmy Stewart II. Sometimes it's painful to watch--consider the last 15 years of Robin Williams movies, or better, don't. But more often it produces results that are slightly odd, and slightly disappointing; the comedian is okay playing dramatic roles, hitting his marks with the steady competence of a talented child actor, but the audience is left to wonder why someone so hilarious is stuck playing a straight man.

This has been the fate of Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler; now it's Ferrell's fate as well. Stranger Than Fiction, in which Ferrell plays Harold Crick, an IRS auditor with the voice of Emma Thompson in his head, isn't strictly a drama--it's more a high-concept dramedy, built to deliver wry chuckles rather than belly laughs, mixing pithy one-liners with existential angst. But it requires its star to eschew everything that makes him such a joy to watch--his ebullience and his flailing physicality, his boastful, macho posturing--in favor of an introverted minimalism.

Ferrell's Crick is mild-mannered and meticulous; he counts his toothbrush strokes and does long division in his head, while shuttling between a cubicle and a lonely, featureless apartment. He comes out of his shell eventually, as the audience knows he must, but even his transformation remains understated and underplayed, with none of the wacky, giddy, bull-in-a-china-shop qualities that usually make Ferrell impossible not to watch. It's not a bad performance, exactly, but it's a poor use of his gifts--like hiring William Hurt to play the lead in Animal House.

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Stranger Than Fiction's conceit is that the voice in Crick's head belongs to Kay Eiffel, a morbid, chain-smoking novelist (played with Eeyore-esque charm by Thompson) who happens to be writing a novel about, well, Harold Crick, without knowing that her protagonist is real. Her voice narrates Crick's life as it happens to him--"accurately, and with a better vocabulary," he tells a baffled shrink--and then goes a step farther: "Little did he know," Eiffel intones, while Crick awaits his morning bus, "that events had been set in motion that would lead to his death."

This bulletin, of course, turns out to be just the jolt that the taxman needs to turn his life around. In short order, he's learned to play the guitar, sought out literary counsel--from Dustin Hoffman, as a cheery academic who helps Crick figure out what kind of novel he's inhabiting--and fallen in love with the fetching leftwing baker (Maggie Gyllenhaal) he's assigned to audit. Meanwhile, Eiffel is suffering from a case of writer's block so acute that her publishers have dispatched an assistant--Queen Latifah, surprisingly flat in an underwritten part--to help her finish her story, and finish off Harold Crick.

Inevitably, life and art intersect, and Crick hunts down Eiffel just as she's about to kill him with a keystroke, raising various significant questions about reality and imagination, the good life and the good death, the novelist as God and God as a novelist. They're never answered, though: Stranger Than Fiction dabbles in profundity but settles for whimsy, a self-conscious cuteness that charms but doesn't quite satisfy.

The movie has a great deal going for it. Marc Forster, the director, mixes visual quirks with intimate set-pieces; Hoffman and Thompson inhabit their roles with the easy class of old pros; Gyllenhaal successfully defends her title as the sexiest plain woman in Hollywood; and Zach Helm's Charlie Kaufman-lite script offers enough moments of deadpan drollery to make the whole thing worthwhile. Yet I would have given it all up, I think, for a chance to watch Ferrell's nebbish-with-a-heart-of-gold chug a few beers, strip down to his skivvies, and bellow, as he did in Old School: "We're going streaking!"