Stranger than fiction (2006)***

Seen on 1-10-2009 - Sony Pix
Cast: Harold Crick, IRS agent (Will Farrell, IRS agent), Ana Pascal, Crick's girlfriend (Maggie Gallenhaal), Karen Eiffel (Emma Thomson), Penny Escher (Queen Latifah)
Dir. : Marc Foster ("Monster's Ball", "Finding Neverland" fame)
IMDB Summary:
"Everybody knows that your life is a story. But what if a story was your life? Harold Crick is your average IRS agent: monotonous, boring, and repetitive. But one day this all changes when Harold begins to hear an author inside his head narrating his life. The narrator it is extraordinarily accurate, and Harold recognizes the voice as an esteemed author he saw on TV. But when the narration reveals that he is going to die, Harold must find the author of the story, and ultimately his life, to convince her to change the ending of the story before it is too late."

My comment:
Crick is a character out of Eiffel's story and the fictional and the real intersect here. Strange experiment this! However, the problem for the author is whether to give a tragic ending to her story by killing her character just when he was beginning to find happiness in his otherwise monotonous life. Strangely enough, Crick seeks her out and pleads with her and the author saves him by giving an unexpected twist to the fatal accident in which the character was supposed to have died in the earlier version of the story; something she had not done in any of her earlier books.
The Professor of English (played by Dustin Hoffman), whose help Crick seeks when he comes to know that he will soon be put to death, tries to convince him that he has to die or else there can't be a great book. Crick also pleads with the author herself. Later at one point, interestingly enough, her character Crick even resigns to die if that makes her book a great one even though he doesn't want to die. However the author takes the unusual step--unusual for her because all her books ended in death--of saving him by giving a new twist to the story's predictable ending.
One wonders what, after all, is the point of all this. Was the filmmaker trying to underscore the artbitrariness of human destiny?