Will Ferrell stars as Harold Crick in this uniquely sweet movie about the nature of humanity and sacrifice.  For an English Literature nerd, this movie was brilliant.

 Crick is an average man that goes about his day in a very ritualistic manner and is very obsessed with mathematics (ironically, all the characters in the film are named after famous mathematicians).  He is lonely and it is clear that life is not terribly fulfilling for him.  One day he begins to hear a narrator talking about his life, which turns out to be a writer named Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson) and he is a character in her latest novel.  He soon finds out that this is an even bigger problem because he is facing imminent death.

Beautifully acted by everyone involved, this film has a very quiet and engaging quality to it.  Crick seeks help from a literature professor (Dustin Hoffman) and prior to finding the author he spends some of the movie trying to decide if he is in a comedy or a tragedy based on the rules of literature.  He also falls for a woman (Maggie Gyllenhaal) that disrupts his routine and makes him reevaluate life.  Even the production design in this film is fantastic with a very visual use of color (or lack thereof) and geometric shapes.

 SO HOW DOES IT END?

 When the trailers first started for this movie I thought it looked impressive, but I wondered how it would end.  I believe it ended perfectly, however there is much debate about it.  In the end, Crick finds the author and reads her hand written manuscript (until the manuscript is typed, it doesn’t happen to Crick).  He accepts that he must die because his death saves a young boy from getting hit by a bus. He tells Eiffel that he understands and that she should make the manuscript official.  However at the moment that Crick sacrifices himself, Eiffel decides she can’t really kill him.  She has spent the whole movie obsessed with how to kill him, but realizes that a man that knows he’s going to die, and chooses to die anyway, is someone worth keeping around.  As a result, her novel is not as powerful, but it’s worth the sacrifice and she saves his life. 

In the end it is recognized that human life holds more value than art, literature has a responsibility to society, and that a willingness to sacrifice can actually free you to live your life more fully.

The combination of great actors and original story produce an incredibly charming movie.  It can be enjoyed at face value but also has a wonderful complexity.  I give it 5 out of 5