Craig Gillespie: LARS AND THE REAL GIRL

[mouton]

LARS AND THE REAL GIRL
Written by Nancy Oliver
Directed by Craig Gillespie

Dagmar: Sometimes I get so lonely I forget what day it is and how to spell my name.

Novice film director, Craig Gillespie, would like you to meet Lars Lindstrom (Ryan Gosling). Lars lives in a small, northern American town where everyone knows each other. Lars works in a dreary office where the most excitement revolves around his cubicle-mate’s missing action figures. He lives next door to his brother and pregnant sister-in-law (Paul Schneider and Emily Mortimer) in what is not so much a place of his own as it is his brother’s garage. He doesn’t like to be touched; in fact, he considers the often-casual act of embracing to be painful, like the feeling your feet get when they’re thawing after a long time in the freezing cold. He lives a solitary life in the safety of his dark, underdone home, watching curiously from his window. If you were to ask him if he was lonely or if he were OK, he would say he was fine and finish the conversation before you could probe any further. Lars is that guy that everyone always knew had problems but no one was willing to put aside their own long enough to help. In LARS AND THE REAL GIRL, Gillespie is more than happy to introduce you to Lars Lindstrom, if only so someone can look at him instead of away from him and see this beautiful human being that has been ignored for far too long.

There is one person in Lars’s life that doesn’t look away. Her name is Bianca. Bianca allows Lars to be himself and loves him for who he is. The only problem with Bianca is that she isn’t real. She arrived at Lars’s door one day in a large wooden box after he ordered her online six weeks earlier. She is made of plastic, has real hair and is anatomically correct. Even though she is designed for sex play, Lars brings her to life for a safe return of love. It is funny at first but it quickly becomes horribly awkward. Suddenly, those that were thought to be closest to Lars realize that they allowed for this to happen by not stepping in earlier. Upon covert psychological analysis (by Patricia Clarkson in a stoic, frank performance that is brutally honest while always sensitive), Lars is diagnosed as having a delusion. Maybe he believes that if people see him with Bianca they will stop judging him for being so pathetically lonely. Maybe it’s as simple as he just wanted someone to talk to. No matter what the reason that led to this mental snap though, Bianca’s arrival is the best thing that could have happened to Lars and to everyone who knows him. Despite the minor inconvenience of her being inanimate, her relationship with Lars brings him back to life.

LARS AND THE REAL GIRL is bravely independent. Gillespie has taken Nancy Oliver’s script/psychological case study and ensured that we as viewers are never allowed to look away from Lars, no matter how uncomfortable we may be. That said, the film experience itself is certainly not an easy one. Lars is not a clumsy yet endearing kind of awkward. He is a man with real problems and rich history that is unveiled piece by piece throughout the film. Fortunately for the film and the audience, Lars is played by a young actor who is not afraid to explore the dark place Lars calls home (and I’m not talking about the dank garage where he sleeps). Gosling is sincere in his suffering, in his caring and in his instability. Both he and Gillespie never allow for Lars to drift into caricature or ridicule. The earnestness of Gosling’s performance, from his difficulty getting words out to his flinching body language, inspires genuine sympathy from the audience and saves the performance from being the farce it could have been in the hands of a lesser actor. It also elevates the film to a compelling study in humanity as the manner in which the townsfolk react to Lars and Bianca says novels about their decency and compassion or lack thereof.

LARS AND THE REAL GIRL is sure to repel some but is extremely cathartic if you allow for it to work its magic on you. Even “magic” is not the right word as there is nothing magical about this movie. Considering it’s about a relationship between a man and a blowup doll, it is shockingly real. Loneliness is real. Mental anguish is real. Bianca may not be real but the love Lars feels for her is and the experiences that led to this delusion are valid and should not be ignored. Perhaps it isn’t just that Lars needed someone to talk to or someone to have as a standing Saturday night date. Perhaps Lars created Bianca to show himself that he truly deserved love despite it never showing its face to him before. In doing so, maybe he would learn that he already had an abundance of it.

www.blacksheepreviews.com

[oscar jubis]

They used to be called inflatable dolls but nowadays they're no longer filled with air. The new models of these onanistic toys are more sophisticated. Lars and the Real Girl, directed by Craig Gillespie (The Woodcock) from a script by TV writer Nancy Oliver, is built around the relationship between a guy and one of these dolls named Bianca. One expects something prurient, or at least irreverent, out of such a premise. However, all Lars (Ryan Gosling, the star of the brilliant Half Nelson) wants to do with Bianca is play house. He is an asocial but decent guy who develops a single bizarre delusion: that Bianca is human.

As the film progresses, we develop a notion as to how and why Lars got to such a desperate place. He introduces the doll to his brother (Paul Schneider) and his brother's wife (super cute Emily Mortimer) until a certain accomodation is reached. Then Lars brings her out in public and the film loses all credibility. Lars and the Real Girl becomes a feel-good fantasy so contrived it would make Frank Capra cringe. We're asked to believe that somewhere in the heartland of America there's a small town where everybody loves everybody else; a place where folks would treat a sex doll as a human being because it's the kind thing to do. It feels good to watch Lars gradually draw closer to a real girl who shows interest in him, but the shameless manipulation we have to endure in the process is too much to bear.

[tabuno]

It's rare for a movie to portray mentally ill people authentically, without some pretentious melodrama that comes across artificial and sickly sweet or simply annoying. Ryan Gosling brings to the screen one of the best performances of a individual who is suffering from some unconventional behavioral and psychological experiences. This simple story shines in its ability to weave a sensitive subject without a cloying sympathetic backdrop. The humor and comedy, mixed with embarrassment and awkwardness, along with drama, and tenderness are brilliantly splashed throughout the script and performances. The undertones of this movie echo with hidden messages about how we ourselves perceive and feel people who are different. This experiential movie is refreshingly different, enriching, and contains socially and individually important themes that really matter in today's world.

[Chris Knipp]

Craig Gillespie: Lars and the Real Girl (2007)

Surprises

Review by Chris Knipp

Trailers make this look creepy, but it’s actually a touching and original movie, more surprising in its rather far-fetched premise than many another romantic comedy and another rare performance by Ryan Gosling (who when he’s good, is remarkable) as the titular Lars. Lars is a young man living in the garage of the big house in the north country he and his brother inherited when their widowed dad passed away. The brother lives with his wife in the house.

As the story begins, Karin (Emily Mortimer) and Lars’ brother Gus (Paul Schneider) are troubled by Lars’ behavior. He works in an office cubbyhole and comes home to the garage in his cheap car and never socializes. They have to literally tackle him and bring him to the ground just to get him to come to supper. Gosling keeps it geeky, but strikes a wonderful balance between shyness and strangeness so that right up to the film’s end, he seems real and unpredictable. What emerges is that Gus left home as fast as he could after their mother died giving birth to Lars, leaving the boy with his depressed dad, a situation that was bad for Lars’ socialization level, which is virtually nil. He doesn’t dislike people or being touched, he just can’t handle either. Karin is pregnant, and the idea of birth, given his mother’s demise, terrifies Lars too. The movie’s premise is that Lars can have a life, he just needs a little help. His odd transition into adulthood and having a relationship is through the bridge of an “anatomically correct� life-sized female doll he calls Bianca.

Knowing he needs a girlfriend, but quite incapable of dealing with Margo (Kelli Garner), the young woman at the office who’s interested, Lars takes a hint from his office mate and orders the expensive "real girl" doll on the Internet. But he doesn’t use Bianca as the fantasy sex partner she was probably designed for. Instead he becomes delusional and believes she’s his real girlfriend, and introduces her to everybody, beginning with a dinner at Karin and Gus’s. Since Bianca, whom Lars soon begins taking around in a wheel chair, is a proper girl, Lars arranges for her to sleep in the pink room of the house while he remains in the garage.

Gus freaks. His brother is crazy, nuts. Karin urges him to calm down and deal with it. She convinces her husband they can’t change the situation and had better humor it. They contrive to have Lars take Bianca to Dagmar, the doctor (Patricia Clarkson, marvelously restrained here), for a checkup (Bianca’s allegedly had a rough trip from South America) which turns into weekly surreptitious therapy sessions for Lars in which Dagmar susses out the situation. Like the film as a whole, Dagmar never reveals or promises too much, but she leaves us quietly impressed with her wisdom and good sense in a tricky situation.

The whole little town goes along with the pretense that Bianca is a person, to the extent that Bianca becomes a hit, and volunteers at the hospital, and Lars becomes jealous of her independence. Eventually it emerges that this "mass hysteria," as it were, is a declaration of love for the essentially loveable Lars—which is the thing he needed to become a whole person.

The fascination of the movie is its own and its characters’ willing suspension of disbelief, which become a metaphor not only for fiction, for acting, and for movies, but for human sympathy and its power to induce love for people and from people we don’t understand. This is not just a study of one damaged individual on the mend, but of a whole little society. Delicacy in the writing and restraint by the actors makes this all work. While the story may seem simple and cute, and in some offbeat way it is, it’s also post-modern and self-referential: there’s something for everyone here, if you’ll just look. This hasn’t got the verbal wit and audience-pleasing nudge-nudges of such mainstream-hip current comedies as Superbad and Juno, but instead it’s got far more originality and subtlety—which may be surprising considering Gillespie and the writer, Nancy Oliver, come from TV backgrounds; but Oliver’s main credits, Six Feet Under and True Blood, aren’t exactly conventional and bland.

The delight of Lars and the Real Girl is that it never feels predictable and its key scenes don’t ever seem obligatory or routine. The movie is quietly absorbing and continually surprising, and those are rare enough qualities to make this quiet little story about healing one of the year's best American films.

[Chris Knipp]

mouton:

I like your emphasis on the fearlessness of Ryan Gosling as an actor. I don't admire Half Nelson as much as some people do, but that is a committed performance. The job he does in the stunningly well wrought The Believer is awesome. Gosling has the ability to inhabit a role that others would be afraid to tackle. you speak true when you say "LARS AND THE REAL GIRL is sure to repel some but is extremely cathartic if you allow for it to work its magic on you." Even though the film is not the creepy comedy I misperceived in the trailers, it is definitely an off-putting piece for some, evidently from Oscar's response easily misperceived in itself, and not destined to have a large favorable audience. Your own conclusions are a little too touchy-feely for me, b ut I still agree that the movie is fundamentally good-hearted and I too found it "cathartic."

tabuno:

I agree. This is a sensitive treatment of delusional behavior. It also uses humor and fantasy to introduce a self-conscious, post-modern note. It is not realistic, but its treatment of emotional need is valid on another level.

oscar:

You like writing summaries of opinion rather than reviews--just what you have accused others (such as mouton) of having done in the past (on Little Miss Sunshine, for example).. The difficulty is that in avoiding an actual review, and only summarizing or nitpicking others' reviews, you don't convince, you only state. You need to draw in your reader, and demonstrate and prove what you assert to be true. You are certainly right that the cooperation of the whole town in reenforcing Lars' delusion in order to carry it to the point where it has to end is, of course, not realistic, nor is it meant to be. You don't really illustrate or prove your claim that the movie is an example of "shameless manipulation." But when one doesn't "tune in" to a film from the start, or at least at some point, one can imagine all kinds of unfortunate wrongs. I don't agree. it's a good, and original, movie. I particularly welcome its freedom from the conventional of a charming but fundamentally unoriginal movie like Juno. However I can enjoy Juno far more than Little Miss Sunshine, which you also praised highly, for dealing with more significant issues in a smarter way and not being merely cute and "quirky".

[Chris Knipp]

Oscar I recognize that your praise of Little Miss Sunshine was not uncritical by any means whatever and I may have overstated my criticisms of your recent approach, but I do think you were too hasty with Lars and the Real Girl.