Stranger Than Fiction (2006)

Harold Crick's (Will Ferrell) compulsively ordered and very lonely life is ruled by numbers, which makes sense because he is an IRS auditor. He brushes his teeth the same number of strokes each day, and knows exactly how many steps that he walks to the bus stop. A narrator voice-over gives us a running commentary, and soon we realize that the narrator is in fact Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson), a novelist who is writing the story of Harold's life and struggling to end the novel, and Crick's life, in a fitting way. His real life is her novel's plot. Harold also starts to hear Eiffel's voices in his head, and so he discovers that his life is unfinished and awaits her literary decisions as well as his personal choices. As his life approaches death Harold also falls for a delightfully quirky woman named Ana, who is his opposite—she sports tattoos and dropped out of Harvard Law School because she wanted to open a bakery. This is a very clever comedy that also stars Dustin Hoffman as a literature professor who functions as Crick's "therapist" to figure out the narrative plot of his life and the likely choices that Eiffel might make, and Queen Latifah as the novelist's assistant. This is a great comedy, love story, and poignant consideration of the "story" that every person must live.