Stranger than Fiction

I love this movie. I'm glad I caught it on HBO. You know how HBO shows you the next movie after the movie you're watching has just finished and then they show the main actors in the film. I'm not really familiar with this title and then I saw the Will Ferrell and Dustin Hoffman were starring in it so I just switched the channel. I figured it must be an old comedy film I haven't heard of and it's probably funny. But since I cannot find something I liked I started channel surfing and was back on HBO. The movie has just started showing Will Ferrell brushing his teeth with tiny scribbles on the screen and someone narrating while he's doing it. And that piqued my curiosity to watch it.

It's about Harold Crick played by Will Ferrell who is a bit obsessive-compulsive. He counts the number of times of his brush strokes, does the single knot when doing his tie because he saves a few second doing it, runs to the bus stop every morning to catch his bus, only spends 45 minutes eating his lunch and a little over 3 minutes for his coffee break (if I remember the numbers correctly form the movie). These he does every single day and does it with the help of his wrist watch. He works as an auditor for IRS and can multiply large numbers in his mind. While showing all these someone is narrating to us, the viewers, what is happening.

And then one day, Harold hears the voice and finds himself bothered by it because he's the only one who hears it and the narrator goes "Little did he (Harold) know that he's about to die".

While this is going on Emma Thomson who plays Karen Eiffel who is a writer is shown to have writer's block and she couldn't think of a way to kill off Harold. So there at first I thought "Oh so Harold is just fictional." But I was wrong.

Because of what he's been hearing, Harold goes to a psychologist who refers him to a literary professor Jules Hilbert, played by Dustin Hoffman. I don't know how but Prof. Hilbert figures out that Harold is part of a story when Harold tells him that the narrator said the part "little did he know…". They try to figure out what kind of story Harold is in and concluded that it's a tragedy based on the mishaps that happened between Harold and Ana, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal. So Prof. Hilbert tells him to just live his life, learn new things, meet new people. Harold decides to buy a guitar and pursued Ana. They fell in love and then Harold realized his story must be a comedy then because Ana fell in love with him. When he went to Prof. Hilbert, who was watching a tape of an interview of Karen Eiffel, Harold recognized the voice and bham! He searched for her and begged her not to kill him. But Karen has already drafted the part of his death and was about to finalize it. She let Harold read it first but she was clearly devastated after finding out that her characters are real people. In all her novels, all the main characters have died in the end. Harold was too chicken to read it so he let Prof. Hilbert read it. Prof. Hilbert read it and advised him to let Karen finish the novel – you will not die as poetic and as beautiful the way she has written it – as Prof. Hilbert puts it.

Oh Prof. Hilbert was right. His "death" was just the perfect way to go, atleast for him. The detail, everything, they all fit the story. Too bad she decided to change it which was the disappointment for me in the movie. But I guess that's what the movie is all about. It's really not about the book Karen was writing but about the real people involved in the book.