By Kevin Cook
Written by “Six Feet Under” screenwriter Nancy Oliver, “Lars and the Real Girl” is the story of a small-town man, Lars, who is plagued by his insecurities and neuroses after being left with the care of his widower father by his older brother. On a broader level, the movie is the story of the bonds of those living together in a small, tight community, and the story of how they respond to Lars and his new girlfriend.
Lars, played to idiosyncratic, nervous perfection by Ryan Gosling, is beset by his neuroses and incapable of forming and maintaining relationships. Lars announces one day that he has a girlfriend, a wheelchair-bound Danish-Brazilian missionary, Bianca. In fact, Bianca is an anatomically-correct sex doll, and the community is forced to come to terms with Lars and Bianca.
The late Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, said, “Its weapon is its absolute sincerity; it has a kind of purity to it.” Ebert, who graded “The Godfather Part III” a full half star better than “The Godfather Part II,” miraculously manages to sum up the movie’s soul and substance eloquently and elegantly. Though the premise of a socially-challenged man taking on a sex doll as a lover is fraught with lewd, lowbrow possibilities, director Craig Gillespie manages to not only avoid venturing into the wasteland of broad comedy, but also to carve out a comfortable niche for his film somewhere beyond sentimentality and just shy of sublime.
The cast is spectacular, yet understated. Paul Schneider, as Lars’s older brother Gus, is gruff but personable; Emily Mortimer, Gus’s pregnant wife, Karin, exhibits an air of simultaneous elegance and provinciality that speaks to the depth of the characters in this film and underscores the complexities of the human situation with which the movie is intimately engaged. There is not just a profusion of real, relatable female characters in Lars and the Real Girl, but a superfluity relative to the Hollywood norm.
Of the 29 characters in the movie with speaking lines and names, 15 are women, and they often converse with one another about subjects apart from men and sex. Perhaps the Bechdel Test is a low bar against which to measure the gender bias of a cinematic effort, but it is also the best one, and “Lars” offers a town full of women who exist for more than their relationships to men.
If you are inspired by the Bechdel Test to seek outside of the mainstream, Hollywood gender paradigm, and if profound, heartfelt exploration of the human condition doesn’t frighten or bore you, by all means pull up what Oliver refers to as a “contemporary fairy tale,” “Lars and the Real Girl.” You’ll be glad you did.
