Odd Use

I often read the New York Times Online Edition. Today I read a review of the New David Cronenberg film "A History of Violence." Under one of the included screen-shots from the film was the collowing caption:

Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello star in David Cronenberg's new film, playing a husband and wife living in a fictional Indiana town.

I think that this is a very odd placement (perhaps use) of the term 'fictional'. It seems natural to use the term 'fictional' as an operator that modifies the content of what follows. Here, the term certainly seems to modify 'Indiana town', but given the placement, it doesn't seem to modify what comes before it. One reading (the most literal one, I suppose) is that the husband and wife live in a fictional town. This surely is not what the writer had in mind, for it is impossible to live in a fictional town. A better reading of this sentence might be to understand there to be an implicit 'fiction' operator that is located before "a husband and wife." But then also, we have the odd situation where the fictional husband and wife live in a fictional town. Surely within the fiction, the town is not fictional.

No doubt, we can understand what the author of this sentence means, but he was certainly not very careful in writing it.