Summary
A narrator tells us that we are about to see “a story about a man named Harold Crick” as the camera zooms in rapidly on the wristwatch on Harold’s nightside table. An alarm on the watch goes off and Harold rolls over to turn it off. The narrator tells us that Harold is a man of few words and “endless calculations.” We see Harold brushing his teeth as the narrator tells us that he brushes each of his teeth 76 times, and has been doing so for the last 12 years. He ties his tie in a single Windsor knot, before running “at a rate of nearly 57 steps per block for 6 blocks” to catch an 8:17 bus to work. “His wristwatch would delight in the feeling of a crisp wind rushing over its face,” the narrator tells us.
Harold goes to work as a senior agent for the Internal Revenue Service, reviewing tax files. Someone in Harold’s office asks him to do a complex multiplication problem in his head, which he does quickly and dutifully. During his workday, he takes only a 45-minute lunch break and a 4 minute coffee break. “Beyond that, Harold lived a life of solitude.” We see Harold walking home alone, then eating alone, then getting into bed at his bedtime, 11:13. “On Wednesday, Harold’s wristwatch changed everything,” the narrator says.
We see brief shots of a father giving his son a bicycle as a gift, and a woman circling a classified advertisement in the paper. Harold brushes his teeth on Wednesday, as we hear the narrator telling the story of Harold’s life. All of a sudden, it becomes clear that Harold can hear the narrator’s voice. He looks suspiciously at his toothbrush and tries to figure out where the voice is coming from. Spitting out his toothpaste, Harold looks around him and asks who is speaking. “How do you know I’m counting brushstrokes?” he asks.
Harold ties his tie as the narrator continues to narrate, stopping and starting as Harold grows more suspicious. The narrator says, “it was remarkable how the simple, modest elements of Harold's life, so often taken for granted, would become the catalyst for an entirely new life.” Harold runs to the bus and the narrator remarks on the squeaking of his shoes. Hearing this characterization of his shoes, Harold looks down, confused, before missing the bus. Another woman runs after the bus, missing it, and Harold asks her if she can hear the narrator. The woman didn’t hear it.
At work, Harold is continually haunted by the voice of the narrator, who describes how distracted and scattered he feels. A coworker asks him to do a mathematical equation, but Harold is unable to do it because he is distracted by the narrator. In a large white room, one of Harold’s coworkers tells him something, but Harold seems upset and stricken. “Dave, I’m being followed,” Harold says. Dave seems confused, and Harold elaborates that he’s being followed by a woman’s voice, and it’s narrating his life. As he moves the files, the narrator continues to talk, characterizing the sound of the files he’s moving as being like the sound of waves in “a deep and endless ocean.” Dave hears nothing, and looks even more confused. A woman enters and hands a file to Dave with a list of people that need to be audited. One of them is a baker, whom Dave tasks Harold with auditing.
The scene shifts abruptly to Harold auditing the baker, Ana Pascal. She is angry at the turn of events and yells at Harold, “Get bent, taxman!” The other people in the bakery begin heckling and booing Harold as Ana confronts him about auditing her. “I was expecting a fine, or a sharp reprimand,” she tells him. “You can’t just not pay your taxes,” he tells her, to which she responds, “Yes I can,” telling Harold that she doesn’t approve of certain things that her taxes go towards, such as “national defense, corporate bailouts, and campaign discretionary funds.” She tells them that she sent a letter with her return that reflects these views, and Harold pulls it out of her file. The letter begins: “Dear Imperialist Swine.”
“Are you an anarchist?” Harold asks Ana, who tells him that she thinks the notion of anarchists assembling would completely defeat the aims and purposes of anarchy. All of a sudden, the narrator pipes in again, talking about how Harold is having a hard time imagining Ana Pascal as a revolutionary. “Not now,” Harold mutters to the narrator, and Ana is confused. The narrator continues: “Harold wasn't prone to fantasies, and so he tried his best to remain professional, but, of course, failed. He couldn't help but imagine Ms. Pascal stroking the side of his face with the soft blade of her finger.” Harold watches Ana. He imagines her in the tub, shaving her legs, and he imagines her naked. Ana walks up to him to ask him to stop “staring at [her] tits.” Flustered, Harold leaves, telling Ana he’ll be back Tuesday. Outside the bakery, the narrator continues, and Harold gets more and more annoyed, yelling “Shut up and leave me alone!” at the sky.
Suddenly, we see a woman standing on the roof of a tall building, smoking a cigarette and looking depressed. She licks a tissue and puts her cigarette out in it, and jumps off the building. The scene dissolves and we realize the jump was a fantasy, and the woman, Karen Eiffel, is standing on her desk. Karen is interrupted by the entrance of Penny Escher, an assistant to Karen’s publishers, who has been tasked with checking in with Karen on the progress of her novel.
“I don’t need a secretary,” Karen tells Penny suspiciously. As Penny inspects Karen’s desk, Karen asks her what she thinks of “leaping off a building,” but Penny tells her she tries to think of nice things. Lighting a cigarette, Karen tells Penny that “when you jump from a building, it’s rarely the impact that actually kills you.” She then discusses a famous photograph of a woman who has leapt from a building, and the serenity of the woman’s face.
Suddenly, Karen says, “I don’t know how to kill Harold Crick, that’s why they sent you.” Karen gets more and more frustrated, when Penny interrupts her to tell her that she’s been an author’s assistant for 11 years and that she’s very good at her job. “I will gladly and quietly help you kill Harold Crick.”
We see Harold getting a message from someone in HR in his office, wanting to talk. In a meeting, the HR representative comments on the fact that Harold has seemed out of sorts. The representative, a hippie-dippy man wearing a necklace and vest, tells Harold, “A tree doesn’t think it’s a tree. It is a tree.” The narrator, Karen Eiffel, narrates Harold’s experience of the meeting, the fact that the HR representative is an “idiot” and that Harold cannot get his mind off Ana Pascal. At the end of the meeting, the HR person suggests Harold take a vacation, then gives him a tender hug.
Standing on the sidewalk outside his office, Harold notices that his watch begins beeping furiously, seemingly in response to the fact that Ana Pascal is nearby. He shakes the watch as it gets louder and louder, then stops. He asks someone for the time and resets his watch as Karen narrates, “Thus Harold’s watch thrust him into the immitigable path of fate. Little did he know that this simple, seemingly innocuous act would result in his imminent death.” Hearing this last prediction, Harold becomes alarmed and begins yelling at the disembodied narrator.
Arriving home, Harold anxiously looks for the voice, examining his toothbrush, then his shower head, then picking up his lamp and throwing it on the ground. He wrecks his room, hoping to disrupt the narration and provoke Karen to speak again. Defeated, he sits on his bed.
Analysis
The film begins by acquainting us with Harold Crick, an exceptionally precise and bland employee of the IRS. We see him as he goes about his day, the uniformity and predictability of his movements highlighted not only by the author who is narrating a characterization of him, but also by the shots themselves. We see numbers projected onto the screen to signify the numerical precision of Harold’ s activities—he brushes each of his teeth a certain number of times, and he runs at a certain pace to catch a certain bus. When he brushes his teeth, the camera takes a rather unusual position on the inside of Harold’s mouth. We see his teeth from inside Harold as he brushes them, an image that is grotesque precisely because of its heightened mundanity.
The narrator, at first just an unidentified British woman’s voice, makes Harold’s boring life all the more interesting because of the vivid way in which she describes it. Harold’s innocuous life is so innocuous that it becomes dramatic, and from early on, we are acquainted with another important fixture of the film: Harold’s wristwatch. The wristwatch is humanized from the start, imbued with desires and particular qualities that would suggest that it has a perspective all its own. The narrator tells us, “His wristwatch would delight in the feeling of a crisp wind rushing over its face,” and then later reveals that the wristwatch begins malfunctioning when Harold’s crush, Ana Pascal is nearby. Thus, the seemingly beige existence of Harold Crick is steeped in elements of the whimsical and supernatural as well.
The film takes a left turn when Harold begins to hear the voice of the narrator as a voice in his head. Instead of remaining an omniscient observer in the course of the story, the narrator becomes a plot point, a distracting and alarming fixture in Harold’s life. The boundary between the world of the author and the world of the character is breeched, and it causes Harold—a man who maintains tight control of his life—a great deal of alarm. What seemed like a straightforward narrative becomes a meta-narrative, in which Harold, the protagonist, must not only contend with the events of his life, but also with the way that those events are being described to him by an unseeable Godlike figure.
That Godlike figure turns out to be a fellow resident of Harold’s city, a depressive novelist named Karen Eiffel. Karen is the epitome of the archetype of a tortured artist, chain-smoking cigarettes and contemplating the edges of existence with wide-eyed obsession. As a novelist, she sees it as her job to try to understand the underside of humanity, to get inside the minds of her characters, and as she describes to Penny, her author’s assistant, her research into the act of throwing oneself off a building, we can see that Karen takes her responsibility to tell the truth as a writer very seriously.
Karen is not the only woman to throw Harold’s life into a tailspin, as his professional task of auditing the passionate and radical baker, Ana Pascal, also throws his world out of whack. He is immediately attracted to the hot-headed baker, who tells him all of the political reasons why she rejects being audited. Harold’s attraction is stoked all the more by the fact that Karen is describing it all the while, for his ears only. He cannot avoid that fact that he is attracted to Ana because Karen is reminding him of it from the moment he meets her. Harold’s hyper-controlled and routine life is thrown into chaos, not only by the fact that his life is being narrated and he is being forced to look at his choice through the eye of an omniscient narrator, but also by the fact that he is falling in love, and with his antithesis no less: a free-spirited and irreverent baker.
