Pefect Endings: Stranger Than Fiction (2006)

Obviously, this post contains spoilers!

Previously, in Stranger Than Fiction: Harold Crick (Will Ferrel) is an ordinary IRS agent: very plain, very quiet, and hated universally. Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson) is an acclaimed writer of tragedies, and she's come up with a brilliant new idea: the tragedy in the life of an IRS agent, named Harold Crick. Unaware of her actions, Karen's narration she writes is voiced inside Harold's head, and only he can hear her- and he starts to freak out when Karen foreshadows his "imminent death". Through the course of the film, Harold seeks help from a literature professor (Dustin Hoffman), learns to loosen up, and even meet the woman of his dreams (Maggie Gyllenhaal). Karen finally comes up with the perfect way to kill Harold: the menial task of his watch stopping inedvertentally causes his death, due to a stranger telling him the wrong time. Through a series of events, Harold saves a boy on a bicycle and gets hit by a bus that he wouldn't have even run out in front of if his watch had been set to the correct time. To Karen's shock, she finally meets face to face with Harold, and to even more surprise, he agrees to go through with the death in order to satisfy the ending to her novel. The sequence previous to this showed Harold getting hit by the bus, and Karen typing feverishly at her typewriter. However, she gets to the phrase, "Harold crick was dea", and cannot muster the strength to finish the sentence.

Here, we join Karen and Professor Hilbert after the incident.


Now, I've read and heard complaints that this ending completely breaks the movie and knocks it down a peg. However, I totally disagree: its sense of wallowing in its own irony and fully acknowledging it caps it off for me as one of the best endings of the new millenium.

You can break down the excellency into three main points here: the acting, the pacing, and the writing. When you're dealing with greats like Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson, you are naturally going to have a great deal of talent and nuance floating around the scene. Thompson's character is nothing short of astonishing, and her narration is perhaps some of the best on celluloid (she should've been nominated for the Oscar easily). Even Maggie Gyllenhaal and especially Will Ferrel are great here, Ferrel giving what is probably his best performance to date. His tinge of confusion and gratitude upon waking is great. And, may I say, Andrew Rothenberg, the actor who plays Dr. Mercator, is a fantastic example of a shining performance in a limited role. ("...which is pretty cool." Awesome!)

In regards to Emma's narration, the timing and correspondence with the editing makes what could've been a corny montage into something of brilliance. Spoon's music accompanies the scene with a poignant kind of grace that only leaves that much more of an impact on you. Lastly, Zach Helm's screenplay is vastly one of the most underrated of the decade, and this scene proves why. Karen hits the nail on the head when she says that the unsung hero is the kind of guy we want to see live. So, she does the world a favor and keeps Harold alive, saving a humble and changed man. The idea of "reverse irony" here instantly brought a smile to my face when I saw the film on the big screen- first, the irony of Harold's life ending by something as routine as a wristwatch is tragic, but becomes something of a miracle when it's flipped around and ends up saving his life.

Now that's writing we can all appreciate.