Lars and the Real Girl Review (2007)

Lars and the Real Girl Review (2007)
Director: Craig Gillespie
Writer: Nancy Oliver
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Emily Mortimer, Paul Schneider, Patricia Clarkson, Kelli Garner
Release Date: October 12, 2007
Runtime: 1 hour 46 minutes

Let me tell you what Lars and the Real Girl is not. It is not a crude comedy about a man who orders a sex doll off the internet. It is not weird for the sake of being weird. It is not a film that winks at the audience and invites you to laugh at its main character. It is none of those things, even though on paper the premise gives every indication that it could go any of those directions. Instead Lars and the Real Girl is one of the most sincere, warm, and quietly moving films I have seen in a long time, and if you have been putting it off because the premise sounds off-putting, I am here to tell you that you are wrong to have done so.

Lars Lindstrom (Ryan Gosling) is a deeply shy, deeply lonely young man living in a small midwestern town. He lives in the converted garage next to the house where his brother Gus (Paul Schneider) and pregnant sister-in-law Karin (Emily Mortimer) live. Karin tries to bring him out of his shell. Lars resists. He has trouble making eye contact. He avoids people. He eats alone. One day he announces that he has met someone online and would like to introduce her to the family. Her name is Bianca. She is Brazilian and Danish. She is a missionary. She uses a wheelchair. She is also, as Gus and Karin discover with considerable shock, a life-sized anatomically correct doll that Lars has ordered off the internet and has decided is his girlfriend.

The film lives or dies on what happens next, and what happens next is the reason Lars and the Real Girl is a special film. The family doctor, Dagmar (Patricia Clarkson), advises the family to play along with Lars’ delusion while she works to understand what is driving it. And then, remarkably, the entire town plays along too. Bianca gets a job. She volunteers. She joins the church. She serves on committees. The whole community wraps its arms around Lars and his girlfriend and treats her with complete dignity and sincerity, because they love Lars and they understand, even if they cannot fully articulate it, that he needs this.

Yes, it is unrealistic. Of course it is. No town actually works this way. Human beings are not this patient or this kind or this collectively willing to set aside their own discomfort for the sake of one struggling person in their community. The film knows this. It is not trying to convince you this is how the world works. It is showing you how the world could work, and asking you how it feels to watch people be that good to each other. The answer, for most viewers, is that it feels wonderful and a little heartbreaking at the same time.

Ryan Gosling was nominated for a Golden Globe for this performance and he earned every bit of that recognition. Lars is an incredibly difficult role. Gosling plays him completely straight with no winking, no irony, no invitation to laugh at him. Lars is sincere in every scene and Gosling never lets the performance drift into caricature even for a moment. There is a scene early in the film where Lars flinches at physical contact, visibly pained by even a casual touch, and the way Gosling plays that moment tells you everything you need to know about what this man has been carrying around his whole life. It is a quietly devastating piece of acting in what is otherwise a gentle, warm film.

The supporting cast is excellent across the board. Emily Mortimer as Karin is the heart of the film in a lot of ways; her instinct to protect Lars and her affection for him drive much of the action, and she is wonderful throughout. Paul Schneider as Gus has the harder road to walk, playing a man who loves his brother but struggles with the situation in ways that Karin does not, and he handles the complexity of that with real skill. Patricia Clarkson as Dagmar brings the exact right combination of professional compassion and dry humor to a role that could easily have felt like a plot device in lesser hands.

One thing the film does quietly well is Margo, played by Kelli Garner. Margo works with Lars and has clearly has feelings for him before Bianca enters the picture. She is a genuinely beautiful real girl with a kind and gentle soul, and in a lot of ways she is as shy and quietly awkward as Lars himself. They are a natural fit in every way that matters, and the film lets you see that without ever forcing it. The bittersweet part is that Lars had to work through his issues by falling in love with a doll before he could get out of his own way enough to notice what was right in front of him the whole time. Margo is patient about it though. That patience says everything about who she is.

Lars and the Real Girl is a slow film. It is deliberately paced and it asks for your patience. There are no plot twists, no villains, no violence, no sex scenes, and no dramatic reversals. It is just the story of a quiet man in a small town, the people who love him, and a doll named Bianca who brings out the best in all of them. If you go in expecting anything other than that you will be disappointed. If you go in ready to sit with it and let it work on you the way it is designed to, you will find something rather beautiful waiting for you.

Wouldn’t it be something if every community treated their most vulnerable people (or anyone else) the way this town treats Lars? The film is unrealistic, yes. But the ideal it holds up is worth holding up.

Lars and the Real Girl gets a four out of five: GREAT.