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He Said/She Said
HE SAID:
Lars and the Real Girl is a film that may be subject to less objective cinematic criteria than most. You are either the type of person who takes heart at the depiction of small-town America rallying around an otherwise sweet and hunky psychotic, or not. Mark me down in the second column. While the label “Capraesque” was flung about in post-film discussion, I would point out that the director of such uber-classics as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life celebrated the wellspring of kindness found in American communities only by portraying it in stark relief against a world-class villain like Mr. Potter or the toxic environment of political Washington. But in the case of Lars, I’d settle for such stock foils as the town bully, the judgmental religious figure, or anyone who doesn’t radiate heroic common sense and preternatural sensitivity. Lars and the Real Girl is the anti-Simpsons. Instead of Reverend Lovejoy we get a local Lutheran priest willing to countenance one of his parishioners toting a sex doll to Sunday service; instead of the dysfunctional Homer and Marge we get a loving brother and sister-in-law who for therapeutic reasons indulge Lars in his delusion that his real doll is a real girl -- with a real history and the real ability to hold long soulful conversations – by putting it to bed every night and giving it a bath. Talk about your enablers.
Substitute, say, a teddy bear or an imaginary being a la Harvey for the character of the doll, and this film would completely degenerate into PG-level triteness. But because one gets a certain frisson from watching the characters react to a life-size sex toy, a certain faux adultness abounds. I guess both admirers and detractors can find common ground by calling the film a fable. Some may it to be just the ticket – a tonic in these troubled times. To deny them such comfort would only be churlish, so I won’t. JB
SHE SAID:
In the opening scene of “Lars and the Real Girl,” Lars Lindstrom (Ryan Gosling) peers out the window of the converted
The main character of this independent film, which was directed by Craig Gillespie, spends the first quarter of the movie attempting, gently, quietly, to extricate himself from human advances. He does not want brunch. He does not want to date the interested girl in the office. He does not want to peek at his cube mate’s porn site.
But he does want something. And that something turns out to be an anatomically correct plastic woman he orders online – a sex toy or “real doll” named Bianca. When Lars introduces Bianca to his shocked siblings, he doesn’t insist that Bianca is real; he immediately treats her that way. Persuaded by the local doctor to indulge this delusion, Lars’ brother and sister-in-law and – eventually, the entire small community -- play along. In some of the film’s funniest moments, the courtly Lars escorts Bianca to church and to a co-worker’s party. He whispers in her ear and interprets her thoughts for the humans in her presence. There is a lot of gaping in return.
If anything makes this celluloid fairy tale workable, it’s the soulful light cast by its star. Gosling seems to be inwardly lit. As Lars, he projects something so broken and deeply sad that it’s difficult to turn away from him. In one scene in “Half Nelson,” a 2006 film in which Gosling played a crack-addicted inner-city school teacher, the camera catches him slowly peering around the corner at an ex-girl friend. One eye heaves achingly in to view, blinks, and ebbs back. He had seen what was lost. There is no more.
In this film, Gosling again crafts a lost character out of fleeing half-smiles and far-off looks. He rakes his hands across his eyes, makes a circle of a computer cable to look at someone, and crumples over his desk at work. He shares scene after scene with a synthetic co-star, and does it with humility and feeling.
The film’s lighting, its quiet, dignified treatment of the doll, also plays a critical role. As the story unfolds, Bianca appears to take on warmth. She emerges from a crate, but when a party-goer later calls her “a slutty hunk of silicone,” the comment feels like an act of violence. As the town people accept Bianca into their lives, the snow begins to melt, people laugh, Lars goes bowling.
Nancy Oliver, who penned the screenplay, wrote more than a dozen episodes for HBO’s funereal hit “Six Feet Under.” The movie shares some of the series’ absurd sad-funny ethos. But “Lars and the Real Girl” extends the make believe beyond the cable show. This isn’t Los Angeles, but a town situated so far north that the lone doctor appears to serve all the citizens’ needs, physical as well as psychological, and the hospital is willing to pretend that a delusional young man’s doll deserves a “life”-saving dash in the ambulance.
Surely, everyone who sees this film will have at least one moment where the suspension of disbelief teeters at the edge. Would a medical official truly advocate this way of addressing mental illness? Would the hard-working dudes at the auto shop really accept Lars schlepping around with a sex toy? When the film ended, one dismayed audience member leaned over and said to me, “It’s a feel-good portrait of mental illness.”
Yeah, maybe. But in a theater nearby, “Saw IV” will soon hack its blood-spattered way through several hours of celluloid. No matter how outlandish the premise, this quiet, beautifully filmed tale comes as a welcome and colorful relief. MM
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