Stranger than Fiction (2006)

directed by Marc Forster

Leah Carlson-Downie

There’s a scene I’ve always loved in the film Stranger than Fiction where Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal) makes Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) eat a chocolate chip cookie. Harold, who works for the IRS, meets Ana when he’s sent to her bakery to conduct an audit. Harold immediately develops a crush on Ana, elucidated by the narration he’s lately been hearing in his head—a voice that turns out to belong to famous author Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson). Harold isn’t that subtle about his sudden attraction (“Mr. Crick. You’re staring at my tits.”), and Ana’s teasing of the clearly flustered Harold shoots their should-be-antagonistic relationship through with a playful flirtatiousness from the start.

In this particular scene, Ana reveals something of herself to Harold through the act of baking. One night, after making the auditor’s day hell by purposefully scrambling all of her documents, Ana extends an olive branch when she suggests that Harold have a cookie from the fresh batch she’s just taken out of the oven. After some resistance, Harold eventually relents. When he tastes the cookie, he has a visible revelation. It’s in this moment that Harold and Ana connect. Harold eats the chocolate chip cookies that Ana made, and he finally sees her. One gets the sense that this is entirely intentional on Ana’s part. In contrast to her spiky demeanor in earlier scenes, Ana visibly softens as she watches Harold blissfully chew, obviously deriving satisfaction from seeing him express his pleasure with something she made. She’s happy that her cookie—that she—has struck something so deep within him.

Harold breaks the spell when he refuses to take the rest of the cookies home, saying that it would constitute a “gift” and therefore be a breach of professional ethics. He tells Ana that he’ll pay for the cookies, to avoid a conflict of interest, and Ana becomes angry and embarrassed. Only then does Harold realize that she baked the batch specifically for him, precisely as a gift, as an apology, and as an admission that she might feel attracted to him, too. Ana emotionally offers herself up to Harold through her cookies, and he inadvertently rejects her by misreading the situation.

That’s a lot of pressure to put on a cookie, but, God, I understand it.

The summer before my sophomore year of college, I moved into an apartment of my own off campus. I convinced my parents, who were paying the rent, to let me get my own place by choosing an apartment close to school that cost about the same as the university housing. It was a tiny, one-bedroom unit—more of an artfully divided studio apartment, in truth—but it had a kitchen, so it was an improvement over my dorm room. Like the rest of the apartment, the size of the kitchen left something to be desired. It was a straight kitchen with almost no counter space, right off of the main room. Only a bit of linoleum flooring and a few feet of wall differentiated the kitchen space from the carpeted living space. I didn’t care that the kitchen was small. I had an oven, and that meant that I could bake.

That summer, I devoted myself to learning how to make pies from scratch. (Last month, I made a fruit pie with a lattice top and posted a picture to my Instagram story; one of my friends replied to say that the dessert reminded her of my “pie days in college,” a phrase which brings to mind something altogether more titillating than the reality.) When the season turned, and there was no more summer fruit, I moved on to cookies and cupcakes and custard pies. I baked because I enjoyed the process, and I felt accomplished when I made a new recipe. I baked because my friends liked it when I shared. At times, I would make something sweet solely for the pleasure of sharing it, to let my friends know that I cared about them. Providing sweets could also be a way to bridge a gap. I didn’t always know how to simply ask to hang out, so I would text armed with something to offer. Hey, this pie is too much for one person to finish. I have extras if you want to swing by and have some!

If that sounds desperate, it wasn’t, really. I’ve just always enjoyed making things for other people, edible or otherwise. The value I find in my creative practices usually has to do with sharing what I make, even if it’s imperfect, because it fosters connection. It’s not solely that I want kudos or praise for the products of my creative labor. I’m a Leo and a human being, so I’m not going to say that I don’t like those things; but I don’t share what I make purely in search of compliments and admiration.

Sometimes, I find that I can’t express what I want to express with words alone. I can’t make myself vulnerable enough with the vocabulary that I’m comfortable using. So, I’ll put a little of myself into something—a loaf of tea cake, an embroidery project, a ukulele cover of a favorite song—and give it away. And hopefully, the people with whom I share the results of my creative practices will understand and see the vulnerability inherent in the act of that sharing. The impulse to create for myself, as a means of self-expression, is often confusingly indistinguishable from the impulse to make things for others, as a material articulation of all kinds of love.

I’ve always been a creative person, but I frequently struggle with the false feeling that the products of my creative practices don’t have much worth. I don’t make money off of most of them, they don’t bring me any sort of clout, and they don’t have anything to do with my career. The results of my efforts are rarely brilliant enough to have any intrinsic artistic merit. I fight the impulse daily to write off my practices of making as worthless because they do not fit the established models of worthwhile creative pursuits.

It’s always seemed way too sincere, and therefore uncool, to admit that I’m like Ana. To admit that I make things because I want to be perceived, on some level. To admit that my creative processes have always been less about the final products and more about the moment of connection that happens when I share them.

But Stranger than Fiction suggests that the creative practices that give life meaning are precisely the ones rooted in vulnerability and shared in love. Ana’s baking is framed as one such meaningful and positive creative practice. And Harold’s guitar playing is another.

I see the cookie scene as the first of a pair of scenes that make this argument. In each scene, one half of the central couple creates something for the other, rendering themselves vulnerable in the process. In both scenes, the creative acts serve as a deliberate, yet tenderly hesitant, form of exposure. And one gesture begets the other, establishing a gentle sense of reciprocity.

The second scene, of course, is the one where Harold plays “Whole Wide World” for Ana. As Harold reconciles himself to the fact that, as promised by the narrator in his head, his death is indeed imminent, he begins looking for ways to live his final days meaningfully. He refuses to spend his potential last days on earth as an office drone with no idea of what truly makes him happy. He takes time off of work. He cautiously pursues Ana, throwing professional ethics to the wind. He makes friends with a coworker he had previously ignored. He fulfills his “oldest desire” and buys himself an electric guitar.

To make things right with Ana, Harold has to apologize for his blunder with the cookies. So, in one of the film’s more remembered scenes, he shows up to her bakery with a bunch of “flours.” But the “flours” aren’t what win Ana over in the end. No, she only jumps Harold’s bones after he makes something for her: a cover of a simple, two-chord song.

The scene only works as beautifully as it does because Ferrell’s singing is so thoroughly ordinary. Ana isn’t impressed because Harold sings or plays like a rock star. She’s stirred because he’s sharing a piece of himself, a piece that he’s unsure of, with her. He doesn’t sound awful, which would be a turn off, but he doesn’t sound overly polished either.

Harold clearly feels something when he plays, and he gets lost in his own little world. Ferrell purposefully sings quietly and carefully, emphasizing how uncertain Harold is of his ability. The actor keeps his eyes closed the entire time he plays, as if Harold has to shut out distractions as tries to get the song right. Singing with your eyes closed is earnest as hell—painful to witness, even, if you’re Hugh Grant’s character in About a Boy. Ana, however, finds Harold’s concentrated, serious singing to be wholly endearing. Watching the scene, it’s not hard not to agree with her.

Honestly, this is always what I want when I share my creations with another person. I want them to share their creative works with me, too. When I make something for someone else, it’s always an unspoken invitation to be unguarded. Maybe that is too much pressure to put on a cookie, but I can’t help it.

Harold’s relationship with Ana gives his life a newfound meaning, and it’s this relationship that makes him want to fight to continue living. I find it significant that Harold and Ana open themselves up to each other through creative acts. Stranger than Fiction is, among other things, a meditation on the value of art; but unlike so many other films about art, Stranger than Fiction depicts and decisively defends the value that I find in my own creative practices.

Karen Eiffel’s novel, the only Great Art to be found in the film, ultimately gets sacrificed for Harold’s life. She changes the ending of her book so that Harold doesn’t have to die, making the work decidedly less brilliant in the process. It’s usually the other way around. Great Artists sacrifice their own lives and well-being, and sometimes the well-being of those around them, at the altar of Great Art. The work makes the suffering worth it, the wisdom goes.

More often than not, though, it’s not Great Art that makes life worth living. The art that makes life worth living is the stuff that people share with you, human to human. As an art historian, I feel vaguely blasphemous and extremely corny for saying that, but it’s true for me. It’s true for Ana, it’s true for Harold, and maybe it’s true for you, too.

Leah Carlson-Downie is a librarian, art historian, and writer currently living in Brooklyn. She grew up in the Mountain West and is slowly adjusting to living at sea level. Leah updates her film blog, Delayed Responses, on a monthly basis, and she can be found on Twitter @themingtacular.