Cinema Hype

The more I think about Lars and the Real Girl, the better I like it. By now, the quirky small-town romantic dramedy co-starring Patricia Clarkson isn’t such an anomaly. We’re used to it. But how many of those quirky small-town romantic dramedies also feature an “adult companion doll” embraced by that small town, volunteering at the hospital and getting elected to the school board?

I didn’t think so.

The point of Lars, of course, isn’t Bianca the doll, but Lars (Ryan Gosling), the pathologically shy young man who orders her and begins to treat her as his girlfriend. Unsurprisingly, Lars is going through a few things. Even more the point, perhaps, are the people who come with Lars whether he wants them to or not: his brother and sister-in-law, his coworkers, and the residents of his rural northern town. This is a story of concentric rings–not just an individual, but a family; not just a family, but an entire community. As such, it’s not so much strange as it is slow and sweet and a little bit funny but a little bit sad, and surprisingly unpretentious.

It’s hard to identify Lars as a comedy or a drama, mostly because it tends to be both at the same time, or at least it can be. Much of the humor comes from a clash of two schemes of logic: there’s the internal logic of the movie, where Bianca is a treasured member of the community and a vital part of Lars’s life, and there’s the logic of the audience, where Bianca is a sex doll ordered off the internet and carried around a rural town for a few months. The visuals of this external logic superimposed over the goings-on in the script mean that practically any moment can be funny–just look at what’s happening on the screen and think about it rationally for a minute. Even better, check out the sexy, faux-interested smirk on Bianca’s face, and then check out what’s going on around her. See? Instant humor!

One look at the ads for Lars show that it’s a bit of a weirdness minefield, one of those films that threatens to bury itself in too many layers of quirky characters and dialogue. So it’s surprising, afterwards, to look at the movie and realize that writer Nancy Oliver has neatly sidestepped most of the obnoxious traits of the genre–nothing stands out as a wrong note or an embarrassing moment. This is a victory for indie filmmakers everywhere, as well as indie-film audiences, who just can’t take much more. The cast is also pleasingly indie-friendly without taking it overboard: there’s the aforementioned Clarkson spotting, Gosling disappears flawlessly into Lars and his social issues and his truly unfortunate mustache, and it’s always nice to run into Paul Schneider. Emily Mortimer is pretty unconvincing as a pregnant non-Brit (she weighs twelve pounds, baby belly included, and kind of looks like she’s recently comes traipsing off the moors, no matter what she does), but she pulls through where it counts: she’s utterly believable and totally sympathetic as a woman who cares deeply for her brother-in-law. The cast is rounded out by a whole passel of familiar-looking folks playing Lars’s loved ones, or rather, those by whom Lars is loved. It all fits together nicely, quietly, with a minimum of fanfare but just enough zip to keep things interesting. Well done.

Lars and the Real Girl, movie review, Ryan Gosling, Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson, Indie film, Nancy Oliver