From today's Oregonian....
Lars (Ryan Gosling) is shy, polite and utterly insane.
When we first meet him in "Lars and the Real Girl," he seems like your garden-variety indie oddball. Lars is hiding under a mustache and layers of clothing and lives in his brother's garage in a small northern town, all frozen smiles and flinching and fear. He's so terrified of human contact, he must literally be tackled by his pregnant sister-in-law (Emily Mortimer) to get him to walk across the yard to have dinner with her.
Then, one day, he opens up a little -- proudly announcing he has a visitor. "She doesn't speak much English, though," he says. "She's in a wheelchair."
Her name is Bianca. And she is a "RealDoll," an ultra-lifelike, anatomically correct silicone sex puppet. Lars is under the impression that this fully poseable mannequin is a living human being -- his (chaste) girlfriend, actually -- and that the entire town should welcome her with open arms.
"He appears to have a delusion," says the town doctor (Patricia Clarkson) who is also, conveniently, a clinical psychologist and master of the obvious. When will it stop? "When he doesn't need it any more. Bianca's in town for a reason."
I'm sure, in terms of real psychology, that "Lars and the Real Girl" is practically science fiction -- particularly after the entire town (yes, the (entire town) decides to humor Lars in the collective hope that he'll snap out of it. But as a fable that quietly evolves from a comedy into a drama right under your nose, producing some low-key cognitive dissonance in the process, "Lars" is surprisingly touching and humane, thanks to its restrained direction and strong performances and sweet-hearted script.
Director Craig Gillespie has had a strange year. His previous directorial credit is "Mr. Woodcock," a B-grade Billy Bob Thornton comedy from which Gillespie was fired before extensive reshoots. But here, the director has total command of the complicated emotions in Nancy Oliver's screenplay -- gently pointing out the insanities we all indulge (superstitions, kleptomania, conspiracy theories, emotional investment in action figures and dolls) and asking us to be generous.
Gosling is excellent at playing a character who's fundamentally unknowable, spending much of his time doing Oscar-nominee-caliber acting against an inanimate (and, from certain angles, unnervingly lifelike) object. And Kelli Garner is adorable as the office-mate with an irrational crush on Lars; she has perfected what I can only describe as "effervescent awkwardness."
The movie's weakest point is its too-quick ending, one more implausibility on a pigpile of them. But by that point, the movie, like Bianca, has largely proven a useful insanity.
(BTW, Dawn Taylor has a lovely report on the preview-screening audience for this film -- an audience so rude and confused I literally had to move across the theater to another seat to do my job.)
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B; 106 minutes; rated PG-13 for some sex-related content.
'Lars and the Real Girl' (The Oregonian, Oct. 26, 2007)
the over all look and feel of Lars and the Real Girl reminded me a lot of Mozart and the Whale (Josh Hartnett plays a character resembling Ryan Gosling’s), it's very much about acceptance and unconditional love as well, Gosling did a great job playing out his character's psychological transitions
Posted by: patrick | April 24, 2008 at 02:12 PM