The other major conflict is whether Kay, who has killed characters in all of her books, should kill Harold, even though it means that the actual Harold will also die. (This is played as a serious emotional crisis for her, and Emma Thompson does what she can to make it convincing, but not much can be done.) After Harold and Professor Hilbert have read the manuscript, the good professor convinces Harold he should sacrifice himself so that Kay's novel can have the only fitting ending. Are these people nuts? Forget that the narration is clearly third-rate, Helm and the director Marc Forster evince a sentimentality about the importance of art that is so insincere it's barely recognizable as the product of human minds.

This also cuts to the core of the movie's narrative structure. Stranger Than Fiction is a romance in which Harold, an ironic nothing of a protagonist, undergoes a spiritual rebirth as the hero of a comic courtship plot. But the content of the movie's spirituality is so meager that it's known mainly by signs that are either trivial (Harold's picking up the guitar; his telling Ana how to save money on taxes legitimately) or daft (his willingness to die for Kay's book). The characters have been conceived allegorically, but since the romance structure merely pretends to a spiritual foundation, there are only these few trite notions for the characters to bring to life by their symbolic interactions.

Thoreau, too, invoked romance narrative in his essay, but much more challengingly and on an infinitely more elevated plane:

They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humility; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountain-head.

The one nice touch is when Harold brings Ana flours — she's a baker, remember. But Will Ferrell is so muted here that he can't bring much life to that sweet pun, or to Harold's self-strangling inhibitions, or to his subsequent unleashing. The character makes use of nothing that makes Ferrell a star, which is what critics are responding to when they praise an irrepressible comedian for deflating himself to fit inside the box of a "dramatic" role.