A Beautiful, Existential Film... A Breath of Fresh Air

Rating: 8/10 (25 March 2007)

Harold Crick lives his life the same day after day until he begins to the hear the voice of the narrator, telling him everything he's doing and is about to do. This is when he becomes aware of his impending doom, and seeks out the narrator, hoping she will not tell the end of her story.
Will Ferrell (playing Harold Crick) takes a nice change of acting here. While this is still a "comedy" in a general sense, it's not the kind where you laugh a lot or expect stupid behavior. It's a more mature, refined comedy. And I think Ferrell really proved something to us all when he took this turn.
Dustin Hoffman provides the best character in the film (which is even better because it's played by Dustin Hoffman). A literature professor who tries to find Harold's author based on his life events and the use of the phrase "little did he know". This is where the existential aspect really comes in -- life as literature, a deep philosophic tradition (I won't get into it here).
Maggie Gyllenhaal: Great actress, beautiful... and love the anarchist baker character (at a bakery called The Uprising). Wonderful.
Is the narrator/author Nicholas Sparks? She's known for killing off all her main characters. It would be like as if in the middle of "A Walk to Remember" that Mandy Moore realized that Sparks was writing her. "Oh crap," she's say. "Any hope of surviving this film has just been completely shot." This will be the first time I ever wrote a "spoiler" but I have to, because the only part of this movie really worth discussing is the very end. Harold is supposed to die, he is written to die, and we see him dying. To me (and most people I talked to) this was the perfect ending -- end it here and fade to black. But instead they make him survive the impossible and the ending is changed. Which was horrible.
The only part that makes this new ending redeeming is Dustin Hoffman, who has seen both endings and informs the narrator that the original ending was vastly superior. The fact the movie actually admits it would be better to do what they chose not to gives them some credit... though I still wish he had died.