Like running into an old friend...

       It had been almost a year, and so I decided to watch the movie Stranger Than Fiction for probably the 8th or 9th time. Sometimes before I watch a film that I have seen many times before I wonder to myself if this is going to be the time that the movie stops speaking to me, or if on this occasion I won’t weep at the end, or if during this watching the movie will just sit there and I will feel nothing. This has happened a few times in the past; a movie that I loved so much the first or second time I saw it will suddenly just sit there, empty, without anything in it that I loved before. And this occurs more than ever during a semester such as this one: a semester three quarters full of literature classes. Poring over texts for hours each week trying to find meaning and structure and patterns can lower my tolerance for weakly written dialogue, predictable story lines, or (one of my biggest pet-peeves in a film) the attempt to elicit an emotional response with the death of an under-developed character. The tendency to analyze and deconstruct everything cannot always be switched off the moment you leave the classroom.

       With all this in mind, when I pressed play on the remote control, I felt some slight apprehension at the possibility of one of my favorite films losing some of its shine. However, I am happy to report that this fear was not realized. There was no disenchantment this time. If anything, the over-analyzing and deconstructing only helped me discover little things I had never seen or been aware of before. I felt renewed, and once again drawn into the strange twists in the story and the amazingly endearing character of Harold Crick. I was enchanted anew with even the premise of the film, in which a character of a story becomes aware that he is indeed a character in a story. The moment when Harold first hears the voice of the narrator describing his actions as he completes them is one of my favorites scenes, not only in this film, but of films in general, starting from the moment of hearing her to her pronouncement of his imminent death. I love the balance between Harold and the narrator advancing the story in turn, neither of them ever being 100 percent in control of the plot. I love the levels of dramatic irony between the two of them and how they gradually become aware of each other’s existence, and how this awareness itself changes the outcome of the story. I love the idea of a wristwatch as a palpable character in the story, a character that advances the plot, a character that thinks and feels.

       After tonight I have no worries about Stranger Than Fiction ever being relegated to the piles of movies for which the thrill is gone. I know that on each viewing I will feel the same attachment to Harold Crick, and that I will cry every time he accepts his fate and chooses to face death even after reading the conclusion to his own story.