Lars and the Real Girl
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Movie Reviews of Lars and the Real Girl
Movie Review: A Boy and His Doll
Summary: 5 Stars
In "Lars and the Real Girl," Ryan Gosling plays a damaged young man who lives a delusion: he orders a life-sized sex doll from the Internet and interacts with it as if it were an actual living person. In order to help him work through this, the small town he lives in plays along, going so far as to include the doll as a member of the community. Clearly, this idea is completely unrealistic, downright implausible. But somehow, in some maddeningly unexplainable way, this film manages to be both engaging and endearing. Much like the character of Lars, we also buy into a delusional premise and see it through to the end. The film itself is the delusion, one of the most enjoyable delusions I've experienced this year.
Almost as soon as the film begins, Lars' situation is made clear--despite having a job, despite being able to function on a daily basis, he's socially paralyzed, unable to strike up even the shortest of conversations. He avoids people like the plague, and should anyone try to approach him, he tenses up and looks away, retreating into a bubble that he doesn't want burst. No one understands this better than his pregnant sister-in-law, Karin (Emily Mortimer), who tries so hard to include him in her life that it's overbearing. Her husband, Gus (Paul Schneider)--who's also Lars' brother--is nowhere near as persistent, not because he doesn't love Lars, but because he just doesn't understand him. And since Lars lives in Gus' converted garage, which was built separately from the main house, neither he nor his wife have to travel far to see him.
One day at work, Lars is shown a website that sells life-sized, anatomically correct female sex dolls. It's easy to assume that Lars has absolutely no interest in sex; I'd be surprised if he has even gotten his first kiss. We do know that Lars finds pretty much any form of physical contact painful, especially hugs. He describes the sensation later in the movie: being touched feels as uncomfortable as frozen feet suddenly warming up. We never really understand why he feels this way, but then again, we don't need to understand. It's enough to know that growing up, he was left alone with a heartbroken single father. What is important is that Lars' needs are strictly emotional; quite simply, this man is incredibly lonely.
So imagine Karin and Gus' excitement when they hear that Lars has a visitor. And then imagine their shock when they discover that his "visitor" is actually a doll. Lars, of course, doesn't see things the same way; in his mind, his visitor is a woman named Bianca, a religious, handicapped young woman who's half Brazilian, half Danish. He says that they met on the Internet. In their confusion and frustration, Karin and Gus seek psychological counseling for Lars, and he receives it under the guise of Bianca's medical treatment (she has a disease that results in low blood pressure). Here enters Dr. Dagmar (Patricia Clarkson), a physician/psychologist who understands that Lars is using this delusion to fill some kind of void. She feels that only he can work through it--no one can convince him that his "girlfriend" is an inanimate object. The only thing that Karin and Gus can do is play along until Lars decides to give it up.
The rest of the film follows an altogether charming path of discovery, not only in terms of Lars, but also in terms of those closest to him (as close as they can get, anyway). The community at large begins to accept Bianca as a regular person, including her in school functions, hospital visits, and even as a display model for a department store. Watching Lars interact with Bianca is like watching a child playing with his or her favorite toy--a young imagination attaches so much significance to toys, and often times, the creativity levels skyrocket. A cardboard box becomes an impenetrable fort. A plastic car becomes an intergalactic spaceship. And yes, a doll becomes a child's best friend. The conversations between Lars and Bianca speak volumes, despite using everyday language. Example: when Bianca is given a flower arrangement, Lars says something to the effect of, "They'll last forever because they're fake. Isn't that nice?"
Gus is the only person reluctant to take part in Lars' delusion. His initial reaction is selfish: How will the town think of him, knowing that his brother is mentally unstable? But as the film progresses, Gus' emotional layers peel away, revealing shame and guilt over abandoning Lars at such a young age. It doesn't help that Bianca "sleeps" at his house, specifically in the bedroom once occupied by his mother (who is also a significant character, despite not appearing in the film). As much as Gus would hate to admit it, Bianca seems to have had a positive effect on the community, albeit an unconventional one. In an odd sort of way, she's even responsible for the growing relationship between Lars and a living woman--his coworker, Margo (Kelli Garner).
It's this sense of social development and personal growth that made "Lars and the Real Girl" one of the most unexpectedly delightful films I've ever seen. No, it is not plausible in any way, shape, or form, and if it were telling any other story, I probably would have dismissed it. But in this case, that doesn't matter--it's not dependent on plausibility, but rather on emotion and its ability to resonate with the audience. And resonate, it does. I have no idea how it achieved this, I'm sorry to say. But whatever its method, this unbelievable movie is unbelievably good, working at the same wonderful, carefree level that a child's imagination works at.
Movie Review: Play therapy for adults
Summary: 5 Stars
Lars (played by Ryan Gosling) is a recluse who wants to keep it that way. Family members, church members, and co-workers all try to bring Lars out of his shell, but he refuses to let them know him. He even wears multi-layered clothing as a barrier to keep people from touching him, especially women, whom he fears the most.
However, although it seems like Lars is content in keeping his lifestyle just the way it is, one day he does something completely out of character. He buys an anatomically correct, life-size, and lifelike doll and announces to his brother and sister-in-law that this doll, whom he's named Bianca, is his new girlfriend.
Understandably, they're shocked, but especially his brother who thinks that Lars has gone insane.
Not knowing what else to do, the couple decide to play along with Lars's fantasy. They tell Lars they think Bianca is sick and needs to go see a doctor...but really, the doctor is for Lars.
The doctor soon realizes that instead of being a detriment to Lars's life, the doll can actually be a helpful tool for Lars. Everything that Lars is afraid to say out loud, he can pretend that Bianca is the one saying out loud. Every event he's afraid to go to, he can pretend it's really Bianca who wants to go and he's going along because that's what a good boyfriend does. Bianca becomes a way for Lars to finally communicate with others. She's also a non-threatening way for him to discover his romantic side.
It's kind of like play therapy, except for an adult.
His metamorphosis is beautiful to watch...but also painful to watch, too.
Before I saw this movie, I saw the movie The Notebook also starring Gosling and I thought Gosling's performance in that movie was lackluster (except towards the end).
However, in this movie, my perception of him as an actor has changed. I enjoyed seeing his interpretation of the character Lars. He easily could've made Lars into a comical figure, which he does somewhat, but mostly he makes Lars into a sympathetic figure.
There's a scene where he's slow dancing by himself at a party that moved me to tears. Although his head is down, you can see him crying...but also smiling. It's evident he wants so badly to join the world, but doesn't know how.
The scene where he has his first kiss with Bianca is also heartbreaking to watch, too.
Both scenes were well acted by Gosling.
However, this movie did also have its flaws. Although I thought there was great acting by Ryan Gosling (Lars), Paul Schneider (Lars's brother), and Patricia Larkson (Lars & Bianca's doctor), I thought there was overacting by Kelli Garner ("the real girl" from the movie title) and Emily Mortimer (Lars's sister-in-law).
I also thought the movie tended to move too slowly...though I've seen movies that moved slower than this and put me to sleep, so this one wasn't too bad. The story was compelling enough to allow me to hang in there.
Another problem I had was that the character of Lars's brother could've been better developed.
There's a scene where Lars's brother is talking to the doctor and he says, "Everyone's gonna laugh at him." And the doctor replies, "And you."
From here, I thought we were going to later see a transformation with the brother, too....that it wasn't just Lars who had issues, but the brother, too.
It would've been nice then to have more details about the brothers' childhood since this obviously affected how Lars turned out the way he did...and could've also explained why there was so much emotional distance between the brothers. These two things are vaguely described in the movie, but I craved more details.
More detail would've made the story feel more real and even more tragic.
But the biggest problem I had with the movie was how the whole town played along with Lars's fantasy. I can understand his brother and sister-in-law playing along because they're family, but the whole town? That seemed highly unlikely to happen...especially since there's scenes where the townspeople hang out with Bianca even when Lars isn't around.
In another scene, they even play along by using an ambulance truck to escort Bianca to the hospital. Can you imagine if a real emergency had occurred and they couldn't use that truck because it was transporting a doll? How would they ever explain that to their superiors?
So this unrealism pulled me out of the story a little bit.
Because of these problems, I was thinking I'd be giving this movie a 4-star rating...but then the ending of the movie moved me to tears, so I bumped it up to a 5-star rating. I had to pay my respects to such an original and heartwarming script.
Who knew that a story about a guy and his sex doll could be so heartwarming?
Movie Review: More relatable than you think...
Summary: 5 Stars
How do you show your friends you love them? What words do you use? What actions do you take? What objects in your life take on a meaning bigger than intended? "Lars and the Real Girl" is about how families, neighbors, and friends cope with mental illness. But to stop there would be insincere.
Lars is an introvert on the far end of the scale who avoids contact with others as much as possible. However, things change when Lars tells his brother and sister in law (his neighbors) that he has met someone - a woman. The problem is, that woman happens to be a sex doll named "Bianca."
The movie is advertised in a way to make you assume it is (yet) another film about a quirky guy/girl whom the world just doesn't get. Even the back of the DVD box makes it seem like it is a romantic story about finding true love, as though "Lars" is a sort of off beat romantic comedy. However, this is not a flat, callous movie with alienating "catch-quirk" characters (like Napolean Dynamite or Juno). Lars is different. It takes its characters and themes way below the surface.
"Lars" works on multiple levels. Many people have wondered what therapy would be like if they went. Look no further than here. Patricia Clarkson's character is written and acted so well (playing both an MD and a therapist - which is true of smaller towns), that I felt as though I was peering in on a master therapist at work. For example, many of us might ask Lars about Bianca and try to "fix" or understand the problem. However, when Lars is first presented to the therapist, she doesn't ask. She lets Lars tell her when he is ready. Her focus is on her professional, yet intimate relationship with Lars. She is not concerned with hurriedly fixing a "problem."
Second, Lars's family reaction and coping to his diagnosis is very real. When they are told what Lars has, one member wants to fix it right away. "How long does this illness last?" "What medicine can he take that will change him quickly?" "Won't this be embarrassing?" The other simply asks, "How can we help?" It is a perfect response to someone in crisis. Watching not only the family, but the town characters love Lars is a workable template for how we can respond to those in crisis.
This is where the film got unrealistic to me. There is no way that a large group of people could love someone so much. On my first viewing, this ruined the movie for me because I assumed it was asking me to "watch" a silly movie. However, on my second viewing, the film simply asked "what if?" What if a group of people truly loved so much that they selflessly held and walked with someone without advice giving, "shoulds," or nagging? There is one powerful line where a character says "That's what friends do in times of crisis. They sit and they wait." Job's comforters are nowhere to be found and it powerfully relates to the viewer how we can love others in times of unknown. We can simply sit, wait, and listen.
Thematically, "Lars and the Real Girl" can be boiled down to being a movie about love in several forms. While there is much to say about this, I most want to comment on another theme of the movie - the themes of projection and attachment. It is important that we consider when we watch the film what the power of individual objects can be for us. Lars's condition is not one without relation. "Bianca" is very much a real person in spite of her plastic frame. She is real because Lars projects onto her what is real to him. He projects onto her a relationship where Bianca is the manifestation of Lars's reality. For Lars to be that vulnerable and open with real people is too difficult for him.
While this may seem strange, I would argue that what happens to Lars is something that has happened to you. How many of us can recall a doll, stuffed animal, invisible friend or other blank object who was real and existed to us? They had no identity and language, save for the way we made them to be. Those objects represented something to us. For Lars, Bianca is his means of dealing with physical touch, grief, and human relationship (among other things). She is blank canvas of emotions and attachment patterns that are unique to Lars.
"Lars and the Real Girl" is funny and painful with a tender texture. That is because these are what love and relationships at their most real can be. They can be funny, painful, selfless, intimate, and bear the birthmarks of the soul. When we love one another past our understanding of normal, the power of that love can be more than we really know. "Lars and the Real Girl" gets my highest recommendation.
Movie Review: Love, love, love this story .. Nancy Oliver, you're brilliant.
Summary: 5 Stars
This delightful, inventive, perfectly acted film is not about crazy. It's not about dolls. And it's not about the sad state of things in our digital age.
This is a FABLE about the courage we all gotta grow (up) before we can love or be loved.
Lars is a lonely. Isolated. Boy-man. Wounded by mysterious, long ago events (which are thankfully, never detailed). When touched by another person Lars feels nothing but pain. On our first meeting him he is still literally, wrapped in his childhood blanket, peering out of his shell of a life, wondering what the hell to do with people when they try to get too close.
Lars has a cubicle office mate who is a different version of the same kind of animal. Another boy-man who has figured out how to keep real folks at bay by decorating his imagination with action figures and porn. Sound familiar? He tells Lars about these super cool silicon dolls that are just as real as the real thing. Lars takes hold of the idea and orders his girl. When Bianca arrives she is put through the filter of Lars' imagination. Sweet. Decent. Kind. Innocent Lars. And the story takes off.
Lars could be any of us. In fact, there is a simple scene when a recently strangled teddy bear is resuscitated. What is really resuscitated is not the bear, of course, but the wounded feelings of the real girl (THE real girl) who keeps Teddy in her office as a symbolic source of comfort and an anthropomorphized expression of her own vulnerability. As our real girl clearly explains in this scene - it's not about the bear.
Or - for the kids in the back of the class - the doll.
I LOVED how the people in Lars' world circled the wagons and entered HIS story while he's figuring out the secret to entering theirs.
I got a kick out of Lars telling his GP turned lunch hour therapist how his sister-in-law has this "kinda big problem" - she's always trying to hug people.
Super lovely how ALIVE - awkward, wiggly and flirty - the real girl is.
I was deeply moved by the scene between Lars and his brother when they have their simple, unsentimental talk about 'how do you know when you become a man'.
And in the scene where Lars' brother, fully facing how he's failed Lars in the past, is spared rebuke and is instead given compassion and comfort from his great souled, full with life, wife, I was crying harder than I did when I watched Gwenyth Paltrow kiss Joseph Feines good-bye in Shakespeare In Love.
In a movie year that brought us some sublime dark stuff - 'drink your shake', 'call it', 'Shiva the god of death!' - Lars & The Real Girl, is an unabashed, much appreciated hug around the heart.
At the very beginning of Lars And The Real Girl, we are given the simple key to the story,
"The highest good is to love one another".
Bianca, the silicon prelude to a kiss, damn dependable as she is in her fleece, sensible bangs and busy schedule of community service, has some serious draw backs. She can't bowl. Can't dance. Hasn't an original thought in her squishy head. No warm hand squeezing back. And no real, breakable heart. Because of all this she becomes the most HUMANE expression of Lars. Under her apathetic gaze he practices his limited powers of affection and attachment. Thereby sparing the real girl any damage his own projections of fear and pain would most certainly cause.
Bianca is his hearts training wheels. But the real help comes from the loving, often hysterical complicity of his family and village. Thanks to their unconditional support and patience, Lars eventually grows enough courage to shed his childhood wrap and move beyond the IDEA of love.
By spring he's able to risk the surprise of the real thing.
We should all be so kind.
Movie Review: A Lovable Freak
Summary: 5 Stars
In a hundred years of cinema, there's never been anything quite like Lars and the Real Girl, the new film from director Craig Gillespie and writer Nancy Oliver (Six Feet Under). Lars (Ryan Gosling) is not quite right in the head; he keeps to himself, he can't bear to be touched, and he resists the efforts of his sister-in-law Karin (Emily Mortimer) to draw him out of his self-imposed solitude. Then one day, he asks Karin and his brother Gus (Paul Schneider) if he can bring over a friend. They are delighted, until Lars' friends turns out to be an "anatomically correct" silicon love doll named Bianca. Lars informs them that Bianca is Brazilian/Danish, that she's shy and doesn't talk much, and that, being deeply religious, she doesn't feel comfortable sleeping alone with Lars (in the garage where he lives). So Karen and Dave agree to put Bianca up in their place and, convinced Lars has lost his marbles, they suggest that Bianca visit the local G.P, Dr. Dagmar (Patricia Clarkson) for a check-up, hoping to put Lars under observation. After meeting Bianca, Dr. Dagmar suggests that, for the time being, they go along with Lars' fantasy and see what happens. Before long the whole town has agreed to treat Bianca as real: she attends church, has her hair done, and eventually gets accepted on the local school board.
Funny as it is, Lars and the Real Girl isn't really a comedy; and although it's an exquisitely tender-hearted film, it's never sentimental (having a silicon sex-doll at its center pretty much makes sure of that). Like Lars himself, the movie doesn't allow itself to be categorized. It's a lovable oddity in a felicitous "tradition" of flukes that includes Harold and Maude, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Donnie Darko, and United States of Leland (also with Gosling), movies that by all rights shouldn't work but somehow do. Lars and the Real Girl takes us into unexplored realms of humor and pathos, areas of experience that--outside of real life--probably only these oddball empathic American movies can provide.
As played by Gosling, Lars is a prodigy as well as a freak; he's impossible to get a handle on. How much does he believe Bianca is real? We never know for sure. Lars has a sweetness and vulnerability that's both heartbreaking and heartening, but there's a solidness to him too, a determination and directness. He's a survivor, and though he may be delusional, he's not solipsist. He stays true to his delusions, his fantasy world has a life it its own (he fights with Bianca when he feels she is becoming too independent). Before we know it, the plastic Bianca begins to seem real to us, too.
In interviews, Gosling has remarked upon the similarity between Lars' peculiar affection for Bianca and the love children feel for stuffed toys (Gosling observes how the love children feel for their toys is genuine even though it is never returned). This similarity is made explicit in the movie when Lars gives mouth-to-mouth to a co-worker's teddy bear (Margo, played by Kelli Garner, in a lovely, soulful performance). Like a child, Lars loves from both sides, and by the end of the movie his weird delusion has come to seem almost enlightened, like saintly, unconditional love. (What could be more selfless than loving someone who can never love us back?)
Lars learns how to relate to others by finding the soul in an inanimate object, and by finding his own capacity to love, he discovers his own soul. And the whole town learns by his example. Lars' delusion has the power of vision: it transforms reality into something better than it was before. With its kooky, off-kilter wisdom and its dead-on portrait of small-town Americana (where everyone's a freak on the inside), Lars and the Real Girl is enough to restore your faith in human nature. It's a goddamned miracle.