A wonderful movie about fate, destiny, and mortality

Rating: 8/10 (14 November 2006)

This movie was such the pleasant little movie, and shows Will Ferrel's ability to take on weightier dramatic roles far different from his old school Old School days.
At its heart, the movie is of Ferrel's Harold Crick, a go-nowhere IRS auditor with no friends, living a self-imposed regimented life of constant monotony, doing the same things the same way in the same sequence every single same day. Until one day, he hears the voice of writer Kay Eiffel (played by Emma Thompson) narrating his life, in particular a line of prose hinting his "imminent death," whereupon his life take a turn away from the mundane. Faced with the certainty of his death, he seeks the owner of the voice in his head, and trying to divine whether the way he lives his life is influencing the narrative, or whether Eiffel's writing is directing the path of his life. In the midst of this, no longer fettered by his self-imposed boundaries due to his imminent death, Crick develops as a person aided in part by a renegade baker (in the form of Maggie Gyllenhaal) and finally coming to grips with his mortality.
It may sound like this is a tragic movie of gloom, but in reality, it is a comedic tragedy, delivering humor in the unusual. This may be one of Will Ferrel's best and least annoying roles. Emma Thompson is wonderfully on the edge of breakdown as the death-obsessed author.