Will Ferrell wears a Timex Ironman

Harold Crick has just decided to start living, and so he is sitting on a balcony with a seafoam-green Fender Stratocaster across his lap, fretting his way through "Whole Wide World," the watch plain on his left wrist as he reaches for the strings. The IRS auditor played by Will Ferrell in Stranger Than Fiction has spent the whole film counting things, his toothbrush strokes, his paces to the bus stop, the minutes of every routine, all of it measured against the Timex on his arm. Marc Forster built the picture around a man who hears a narrator describe his life as he lives it, a story about the distance between time as it is lived and time as it is told, and Harold's watch sits right on that seam.

The watch is a Timex Ironman Triathlon Dual Tech, reference T56371, and it is worth being precise, because it is not the rectangular all-digital Ironman most people picture. It is a hybrid: a round analog dial carries the hands, and a small digital window sits inside the face for the timer and stopwatch. So the auditor whose whole identity is measurement wears an instrument that keeps one hand in analog time and one in digital readout, a fairly neat costume for a film about a man caught between the two. It is also, by design, cheap, the mass-market sport Timex sold by the rack for under fifty dollars, which is the point of putting it on Harold rather than something finer; a man who treats measurement as meaning reaches for the most accessible measuring tool there is. The counts and figures that overlay Harold's world were enhanced in post beyond anything the real dial displays, the production using the watch as a storytelling surface. There is a small joke in the model name too. The Ironman Triathlon was built for athletes timing their splits, and here it spends the movie timing an auditor brushing his teeth.