Who is in charge of my life?

Rating: 9/10 (11 November 2006)

Who is in charge of my life? Who is telling my story? What makes my life worth living? Who determines whether my life is worthy of continuing or ending? Stranger Than Fiction seems to ask these questions as it tells the story of an author, Kay Eiffel, whose neurotic and tortured life always produces death for her main character at the end of her novels.
After 10 years of frustration and failure, Eiffel is on the verge of completing another such novel. All she is missing is the manner in which her character, Crick, will die. Why is death the only fitting ending for her characters? I would suggest that our world culture is built upon such a premise of someone having to die for the story to make sense to us. We are accustomed to such endings.
What we see in this simple, but powerful film is a portrait of the ancient god and laws that have shaped us and our cultures. The logic of this god and commandments is simple: someone must be "voted off the island" through death or exclusion for the good of the story or culture. In this case, she is an author who can not write without having death as the ending of her stories. Her novels always follow this pattern. Her success is based upon her slavish obedience to the commandments by which she writes and lives. At some point I began to wonder if the commandments actually restricted her to one course of action. Was god bound by laws and robotically following out a script? Crick seems like a simple fool who goes through life robotically. He, too is following a set of commandments. I almost wondered if Crick were not already technically dead through his slavish following of the rules of his job and his internal need for order. It is only when he discovers that his death is imminent that he starts to move outside of his robotic behavior.
Crick's work as an IRS agent and his relationship with someone he is auditing reminded me of Jesus' relationship with the tax collectors of his day. Crick was reviled by the woman he is required to audit. But this relationship is transformative. The author allows Crick the vulnerability to be touched with desire for this woman. Prior to this moment, Crick did not operate based upon greed, but upon following the "rules of life," which included auditing people whose objections to the tax were passionate and life-affirming. Perhaps this is what rekindled the passion in Crick.
Crick's fear of losing life, had cost him his life. Passion and desire to be LIFE, saved his life. Life is willing to lay down life for the good of another. The death that he was living was an unconscious participation in a system that denies such human freedom and uses fear to enforce it. In the end, was the author of Crick's story transformed as well? Perhaps we are all being challenged to look at our lives. Are we following the commandments of LIFE or of death? I will leave these questions to those who will see this creative and passionate tale.