I will start by telling you that there are **spoilers** here, so if you haven’t seen this movie yet, you may be better off waiting to read this until you have.

You probably remember the plot of the movie if you remember the commercials: A quiet and dull man begins to hear narration of the events of his life, narration that affects how he goes about living it from that point forward. To be more specific, Harold Crick (Farrell) is the living subject of author Karen Eiffel’s (Thompson) work in progress. In order to discover exactly what sort of book he’s in and what that means, Harold goes to Dr. Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman), professor of literary theory. The task takes on greater urgency when the narration alludes to Harold’s imminent death. When Hilbert is unable at first to discern what kind of book Harold is living, he urges him to abandon the search and just go about living the life he’s always wanted before he dies.

To this point in the movie, I saw it developing a variant message to what was summed up succinctly in The Shawshank Redemption: get busy living or get busy dying. It also reinforced the theme of Groundhog Day in that every day will be the same until you make something different out of it yourself. But death plays a much stronger role here than there, and that’s what pushed me to a somewhat more theological/philosophical interpretation.

There’s no mistaking that the author in this film represents God, the creator of man and the “omniscient third-person” who provides the narration. Harold obviously represents that creation and Hilbert is the intermediary. As the prospective go-between who endeavors to help man understand his creator, Hilbert represents religion, the formalized theory by which we come to understand God’s plan. There is a complex discipline to what he does, but it’s unintelligible to those who go about life mostly ignoring the search for personal meaning. To Hilbert, the story should be discernable, it should have structure, and most of all, it must have meaning.

The author Eiffel is hemmed in by the requirement from her publisher (representative of an orderly universe within which even God must operate?) to kill off her creation, an event that means the end of Harold in real life as well. The movie is the story of her struggle to give that death meaning, to make the very event itself significant through its irony. When she finally settles upon an answer and it is revealed to Hilbert, he proclaims the work a masterpiece and implores Harold to go about fulfilling it.

As frightening as this is to Harold, it makes sense that Hilbert finds this answer appealing. What is important to religion is that the plot be advanced in a way that glorifies the creator even at (or possibly because of) the expense of the creation. Paramount to religion is what lives on, something fulfilling to all souls that can be passed from generation to generation and overcomes death – death which reinforces the persistence of that truth

Harold decides that Hilbert is right, and goes about stepping in front of a bus that is meant to be his certain death. But (Deus Ex Machina) Eiffel decides instead to rescue Harold, and a miraculous shard of his wristwatch lodges in a main artery and prevents Harold from bleeding to death. This obviously disappoints Hilbert, who judges the book good, but not as excellent as the first draft. Eiffel defends her decision by saying that a man who knowingly and willingly goes to his death is a man worth having around. (Who does this remind me of?)

Somehow this ending felt a little unsatisfactory, and maybe it requires some unpacking. Assuming the shard of glass is meant to symbolize the simple randomness incorporated into the universe, I can see where one might conclude that, though not everything happens to us for a reason, great meaning nevertheless can derived after the fact. My first instinct was to rearrange the film so that Eiffel writes Harold into death, but the real Harold actually survives. This version has the whiff of atheism, though, in that it immediately and decisively relegates God to the backseat of the universe, an impotent force at the mercy of chaos. Upon further consideration, that would have been a very dark film indeed! Now I’m on the fence as to whether that would have felt more authentic, but I also wrestle with whether my desire to have the film adhere to a specific viewpoint is coloring my judgement. And frankly, it’s not really my place to tell the moviemakers which side to come down on in this debate. .They seem already to have settled on God’s power over all things, including the occasional randomness of the universe.

What is intriguing to me about this is the attempt to syncretize the two sides of a great debate, the evolutionists and the creationists. The creationists see nothing random in the universe, as it all progresses according to a grand design. The evolutionists see a universe that implies design, but is actually the result of persistent randomness. The movie wants to place randomness under the rule of design, and that feels satisfying, but I can’t be sure how well that holds up upon further inspection. A course on religion in America at UH provided me my introduction to deism (i.e. the watchmaker theory), and it seemed to make a tremendous mount of sense to me. But people’s desire for order seems to lead to all sorts of confusing conclusions. When a good thing happens to a good guy, it makes sense to us that God is just and this event reinforces it. But when a bad thing happens to a good guy, those same people can’t be bothered to try and understand God’s complex plan. A "just" God is an easily understood being with motivations that dovetail nicely with our own, but when something inexplicably bad happens, all of a sudden God is a murky haze of divine inclinations that are beyond rapproach but obediently accepted. That’s a benefit of the doubt I think we’d all love to have.

There’s enough going on in this movie and the surrounding debate to merit a real bull session for those inclined to discuss these kinds of topics. And with all these ideas about, I think it’s unreasonable to expect satisfactory answers from a simple movie, but I am impressed that someone thought to address the ideas in an accessible, if not entirely enjoyable way. Whether you find the conclusion adequate probably depends on the conclusions you brought with you into the viewing.

Addendum:
As for the cinematic virtues of the film, I didn’t find many. Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson gave unsure performances, perhaps a reflection of the ideas herein, but they weren’t particularly bad. Will Farrell was mostly wasted: not funny and not particularly empathetic in his turn at the “lost but endearing protagonist, usually played now by Jim Carrey” role. Maggie Gyllenhaal was capable as the free-spirited anarchist baker. Queen Latifah was obviously given the wrong directions by casting for another film and wanders through, leaving nothing indelible. I think maybe this movie was too “book-y” and therefore needed primary actors of greater subtlety and sophistication. Hoffman can only do so much in a supporting role.