A life well spent

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The world of Harold Crick is precisely measured and ordered: he is in control of every aspect of his life, in all its intricacies. Or so he thinks.

Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is an IRS agent whose attention to detail extends well beyond his work hours. As well as performing exacting audits on his clients' accounts, he calculates his life too: he counts each stroke of his toothbrush and each step to work. He nearly misses the bus in the morning, but always by the same number of seconds. Even if Harold's grip on the timings of his day extends further than most of ours, we can still relate to his basic desire to control his life. But what about the biggest moments in our lives? What would happen if we could influence the moment that affects our lives the most, even our death? Stranger than Fiction is a film that offers romance, humour and a quirky but thought-provoking look at the biggest question for all of us. It is a brilliant mix.

It is a Wednesday, stranger than most. The order of Harold's life is forever displaced when he begins hearing a voice narrating his life. The voice is an annoyance at first, relaying to him – and to us – the precision of his morning dental routine, the extent of his lateness for the bus and the tedium of the office day. It's insightful too: it knows about Harold's day-dreams of the soothing ocean waves as he sorts folders at the IRS, and it is uncannily perceptive of his unusually romantic thoughts about his new client, Miss Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal). But his annoyance turns to profound distress when, resetting his watch, he hears the voice calmly narrate, ‘Little did he know that this simple, seemingly innocuous act would result in his imminent death.’

That voice belongs to struggling and charmingly jittery writer Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson). Once an influential and prolific writer, she hasn't been seen by the writing community for ten years and, we discover, is struggling with writer’s block on her new novel, Death and Taxes (the title a fairly literal reference to Benjamin Franklin's famous comment, ‘nothing is certain but death and taxes’). We meet her teetering dangerously on the edge of the desk in her sparsely-furnished room, imagining how it would be to jump. She isn't considering suicide, though; instead she's trying to find the most perfect way to kill her main character, Harold Crick. This is typical of Eiffel's way of looking for such an ending, eschewing the more methodical approach of the assistant sent by her publisher. For Eiffel, Harold has to die the perfect way.

Now that the voice has brought such unwelcome news, Harold has the unusual privilege of knowing when his death is coming: soon. Naturally enough, he sets out to find exactly who is narrating his life and he consults literature professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman). Hilbert takes some persuasion (though not as much as we might think), but is eventually taken by the premise that Harold really is part of a story. He poses a key question: is Harold's life a comedy or a tragedy? Hilbert is crucial in keeping the story of the film moving because of his willingness to believe Harold, and the advice he gives him: to go and make his life the one he's always wanted. The voice gives Harold the chance to break free of the obsessive order that has characterised his life: he no longer counts, no longer rushes to save time. As Eiffel narrates, ‘Harold Crick lived his life.’

The unlikely pronouncement of the voice has given Harold the chance to pursue those things he'd always wanted to do, but perhaps never dared. He is transformed from a character who, though likeable, appears to have no special warmth for the other people in his life, and no drive to achieve his ambitions (if he could pin down what they were). The film's director, Marc Forster, grew up in Switzerland where, he says, ‘you never tell people you love them. You know you love them, but you never speak about it.’[1] We might imagine Harold Crick at the beginning of the film as a Swiss gentleman of exactly this cast, and Harold's journey through the film is one of liberation from this, Forster says. Certainly, it's because Harold knows he has little time left that he takes the step of leaving his comfortably ordered life behind and goes on to seize his dreams.

The most prominent expression of his new attitude to life is in his developing relationship with the owner of the ‘Uprising Bakery’, Ana Pascal. They get off to a rocky start (a key element for a comedy, Hilbert says), but one evening, throwing out auditor-auditee protocol, he visits her with a charming box of flours (colour-labelled, of course – he's still Harold). The contrast between the characters when they met had been stark. He, an auditor for the IRS with an obsession for following the rules, to the extent that he rejected her offer of cookies in case it was construed as a gift; she, who refused to pay twenty-two percent of her taxes because she disagreed with how the government spent it. Yet she breaks down Harold's obsession with order and control. When Hilbert tells Harold to forget Ana he replies, ‘How can I forget her? She's all I think about except numbers.’ By the end of the film, Harold has even forgotten about numbers. This is exactly the progression Forster refers to. For Harold, it was the unusual knowledge of his impending death that pushed him to ‘live his life’, to pursue his ambitions. Much like Harold, how many of us want to throw off the tedium of daily routine and live a more fulfilling life?

Yet even such a satisfying life can be brought to a sudden stop. One visit to Hilbert's office settles it. When a video of Eiffel is playing in the background and Harold naturally recognises the voice, Hilbert relates the bad news: Eiffel only writes tragedies. Her heroes die, and die horrible deaths from gout, smallpox and heart attacks. Elsewhere, Eiffel settles on the perfect ending for her book, and the death of Harold Crick seems to be set. This is all bad timing for Harold, and he sets about searching to find this author, though she is apparently untraceable. It is only by scouring the IRS records (another example of Harold's new attitude to the rules) that he finds her phone number. He dials, and Harold is in contact with the very person writing his life.

Harold asks to see plot's outline, to see how he is to die. Eiffel is deeply distressed – quite a natural reaction to the turn of events (the logical questions about the workings of this author-character relationship aren't explored, but that is part of the film's charm). It is Eiffel, not Harold, who asks some of the deeper questions about her role in directing this character's life. How can she kill another human being? These issues are thrashed out in a dispute between Hilbert and Eiffel which has the flavour of Greek myth: two gods deciding the fate of the man. For the viewer, the questions are not stated but are clear: how are such decisions really made? Like Harold, can we reach and even influence those who make them?

Harold has a choice to make, but it's not whether he lives or dies. Rather, he makes the decision to willingly give up his own life for the sake of the author. He decides to give up his life for Eiffel's work of literature after Hilbert's persuasive argument that doing so will give his death much more meaning than it otherwise would have. ‘You will die someday’, Hilbert says, ‘Heart failure at the bank. Choke on a mint. Some long, drawn-out disease you contracted on vacation... you will absolutely die and I guarantee it won't be nearly as poetic or meaningful as what she's written.’ In the face of his certain death, whenever it comes, Harold's decision is to make it meaningful, significant.

Eiffel's comments at the conclusion of the film becomes rather jarring in this context. If Harold has invested so much meaning in his life and has been given the dignity to choose the manner of his death, how can that be reconciled with Eiffel's statement that it is the little, seemingly insignificant accessories of life that really influence those biggest moments? After all, it wasn't the little timings and calculations that gave Harold meaning in his life. Instead, it was when he relinquished control of these details to his life's narrator, opening the way for a bigger story: she knew its grander plot. The key issue raised by the film is this: exactly who is a legitimate narrator? If it’s another human, with the same limited knowledge and slim capacity to always act for the good, what business to they have directing our lives?

But what if our lives could be directed by someone who actually is motivated by our best interests? Jesus was reacting to a group who had been leading people's lives with wrong motives when he said these words: ‘I have come so that they may have life and have it abundantly. I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep’ (John 10:10–11, ESV). In terms that people of the day would have easily understood, Jesus was declaring that he would lead the people to good things, indeed, to a fuller life than they could imagine. The rich and satisfying life that Harold began to search for would come to an end sooner or later, but the abundant life that Jesus offers never comes to an end. When Jesus laid down his life for his followers it achieved two things. First, it showed his goodness, because he is motivated by the best interests of his followers, and he knows what those are because he's not just another human being as Eiffel was. Second, it is actually the means by which he won life for his followers, dying the death that they deserved. When we look at the rest of Jesus’s own life and teaching, we begin to glimpse the rich and abundant life he gives. It’s one with much deeper satisfaction and excitement than Harold had begun to discover.

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