Stranger than ficti(*)n

There are so many different layers at which one can choose to relate to the confrontations and connections thrown up in Marc Forster’s Stranger Than Fiction that I want to begin with Autobiography of a Yogi where Paramhansa Yogananda emphasizes the power of the spoken word and our ability to make truth from intention. The novelist Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson) in Forster’s film has killed the protagonist in each of her previous novels. She is now writing about an IRS officer Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) who happens to exist, who is living the life she is describing, and who begins to hear a third person omniscient narrator in the sky deconstruct his days and describe his inner thoughts.

Which of course takes us to something rather more mundane in our own lives: being able to see ourselves for exactly what we are from the outside. In Crick’s case, the novelist’s voice describes how many times he brushes each of his thirty-two teeth but this voice tumbles out of the typed pages of her manuscript into Crick’s ear. For those of you who have seen the film, my question is: Would Crick have seen his life for what it was—somewhat devoid of real pleasure—without this third person narrator telling him exactly what she saw? In other words, did she manage to save him even as she decided to damn him?

Now Kay Eiffel has writer’s block and doesn’t quite know how to finish off her character or her book. In order to get some inspiration she sits around in soggy cold rain, stands at the end of the kitchen table to imagine Crick leaping off a building, visits the ICU of a hospital dissatisfied that the patients are not yet in the throes of death pangs. As the movie unfolds she will come up with the idea of the perfect ending to Harold Crick and therefore potentially produce her best work to date.

Since the omniscient narrator does not stop, Crick sees a psychiatrist (Linda Hunt) who dryly diagnosis schizophrenia but adds that he could see a literary expert. Enter Professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman). The professor assiduously makes lists of questions to ascertain which book Crick is playing a part in. The voice has already warned Crick of “his imminent death.” And Crick must now find the author and convince her not to finish him off before she types up her last pages.

Professor Hilbert opines that Crick should choose to die since he must do so one day and by choosing his death now in a book he will be part of a story that will live on forever. Kay Eiffel, meanwhile, is smoking a gazillion cigarettes a day and weeping at how many people she has earlier sent off to an early end. Crick himself is trying to excavate the important things he must do to live his life to the fullest before his time comes.

Well played with many inspired moments this film is a mediation on poetry in our lives and the sometimes inevitable confrontation between life and art. To live more fully we must choose art but for those involved in its creation and consumption there is a real-life price involved. One possibly worth paying…