Lars and the Real Girl has a premise that sounds like it barely has enough potential to fill out a four-minute sketch, the kind they bury in the last 10 minutes of Saturday Night Live. It’s the story of Lars Lindstrom (Ryan Gosling), a man living in a snowbound small town in what looks like North Dakota or Minnesota—although he’s so painfully shy that he’d probably bundle up in sweater and down-filled jackets even if he lived in southern California. One day, he orders a “RealDoll”—an expensive, anatomically correct female sex mannequin—over the Internet... and then introduces the dead-eyed “Bianca” to his brother Gus and his wife Karin as his new girlfriend. Lars is obviously nuts—he even hears Bianca talking to him—but Karin decides to follow the advice of the local psychiatrist and indulge his harmless delusion. Before long, the entire town is joining in, and Bianca starts to take on a “life” of her own. (She even gets elected to the school board.) Picture a cross between Harvey and one of those insane-ventriloquist movies like Dead of Night or Magic—and then picture the whole improbable combination actually kind of working—and you’d have Lars and the Real Girl.
I think I admire Lars and the Real Girl more as a technical feat of screenwriting and directing—for its ability to hit the right blend of whimsy and realism and for the way it sustains its unlikely premise—than for anything it has to say about love or loneliness. The film succeeds more because of what it artfully leaves out than what it shows us: screenwriter Nancy Oliver (who also wrote several episodes of Six Feet Under) and director Craig Gillespie (whose only other film, weirdly enough, is Mr. Woodcock) never show Lars dressing Bianca, or posing her, or putting her in any kind of undignified situation.
There are no villains in the film either—no one to speak up and make the common-sense observation that Lars’ fixation on Bianca is actually pretty creepy. (No one except Gus, that is, but he agrees to put up with the situation for Karin’s sake.) And the film carefully dodges the issue of what Bianca was built for as well—Lars, we’re told, is saving himself for when they get married. Actually, Lars is such a timid character that having sex with Bianca seems like the furthest thing from his mind. She’s a companion—Wilson the volleyball from Cast Away, only with breasts and a vagina.
Ryan Gosling goes a long way towards making this project work. But even this aspect of the film is something I feel a lot of ambivalence about. It’s an inventive, meticulously detailed portrait of a closed-off man, a symphony of nervous, tight smiles, distracted head movements, hunched body language, topped off with a head of greasy, badly combed hair and garnished with a mousy little mustache. When Lars goes to a party, his idea of dancing is to stand in the middle of the floor, scrunch his eyes closed, clench his fists, and rock tensely back and forth roughly in time to the music. Gosling is kind of amazing in this scene (it helps that the song is Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place,” surely one of the most transcendent pop songs ever written), but after a certain point, his performance starts to seem too self-contained for its own good. It’s one of those “virtuoso” one-man-band roles that so many hot actors love to tackle—Kevin Spacey and Johnny Depp have built their careers on them—where everything in the movie is set up to indulge their acting choices, so much so that they’re not even required to have chemistry with their co-stars.
That said, Gosling has an earnest, boyish charm that’s hard to resist—especially when he takes Bianca out to the forest and sings “L-O-V-E” to her at the top of his lungs. To my surprise, the preview audience I saw Lars and the Real Girl with was completely won over by it, but I doubt whether it will turn into another Little Miss Sunshine at the box office. It’s too sweet and Capra-esque for the indie crowd, but the premise will probably be too off-putting for the multiplexers.
And who does that leave to go see it? Are there enough members of the doll-fetish community to make this thing a hit? And if they show up with their “girlfriends,” will the theatre staff honour the spirit of the movie and charge them for the extra ticket?
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