ScreenWize

Nominated for an Academy Award for best screenplay, Lars and the Real Girl is an outrageously tender and funny film that stitches up the line between black humour and poignancy with the delicate precision of a skilled surgeon. If you need the slightest reason to feel good, laugh, cry and restore your faith in the absurd wonder of the human condition, you should see this film.

By day Lars (Ryan Gosling) holds down a steady office job and charms the locals of his small wintry community with a smile that could put a baby to sleep. At night he lives in a garage and is too shy or too anxious in company to even have dinner with his family. Yet there’s nothing very wrong with Lars, it seems, that a nice girl won’t be able to fix. Enter Bianca – a very quiet, very gorgeous, half Brazilian half Danish disabled missionary. Ludicrous you say? Well, that’s not the half of it: Bianca is also a made-to-order, life-sized doll, purchased on the Internet and delivered in a box. After introducing Bianca to his stunned brother Gus (Paul Schneider) and pregnant sister-in-law Karen (Emily Mortimer), Lars is encouraged to take a trip to the local doctor (Patricia Clarkson) – to check out Bianca’s low blood pressure that is - and before the week is out many more people are playing along with Lars’ delusional behaviour.

Without the exquisite skills of this fine cast, the delicacy of Nancy Oliver’s screenplay, and the assured hand of director Craig Gillespie, this film could easily have disintegrated into ridiculous farce, smutty comedy or more likely just run out of steam. Yet every time the story is set to implode with the ludicrous impossibility of the situation, a wave of honesty and warmth comes to the rescue, along with a character who asks the question most in the mind of the audience – “why are we going along with this?” Because we care, of course, and because we know all will be well.

Oliver avoids any awkward sexual connotations about the relationship a lonely man might have with a doll by constructing the story as a naive and heartwarming romance, very cleverly finding a way to develop Bianca’s status in the remote community as the tale unwinds. Gosling is flawless as the utterly charming recluse at the centre of the story and is strongly supported by Clarkson as the thoughtful and creative doctor who knows that there’s more to Bianca than meets the eye.

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Filed Under: Reviews by Simon