Lars and the Real Girl
Directed by Craig Gillespie
In the comic classic Harvey (1950), James Stewart played a drunken fellow who claims his best friend is a six-foot-tall invisible rabbit, and is indulged in his fantasy by his frustrated sister. In 1986’s terrifying River’s Edge, Dennis Hopper played a psychotic drug dealer living in a trailer with a blow-up sex doll who helps a group of teenage kids cover up the drug-related death of a friend. In 2007, Ryan Gosling chose to follow up his Best Actor Oscar nomination last year–he was the youngest nominee in the category in the award’s 80-year history–with the lead role in a movie that combines all the hilarity of River’s Edge and all the horror of Harvey.
The movie is called Lars and the Real Girl. It’s about a sweet, vacant, and withdrawn 27-year-old who begins squiring a very expensive and realistic-looking sex doll around the small town where he’s lived all his life. He says the doll is his girlfriend, that her name is Bianca, that she is the very religious Brazilian daughter of missionary parents, and that, because of her religious convictions, he and his new girlfriend cannot share quarters. Lars asks his brother Gus and sister-in-law Karin to put Bianca up. If anyone tells Lars that Bianca is made of plastic, he simply doesn’t hear the remark.
Gus and Karin, who is pregnant, take Lars to the local doctor, who also has a degree in psychology. The doctor talks to Lars and then informs his family that Lars is suffering from a “delusion”–a diagnosis that evidently required an advanced degree. And said doctor, displaying what screenwriter Nancy Oliver and director Craig Gillespie clearly believe is great wisdom, tells Lars’s family to go along with it until there’s a way of determining the cause of Lars’s delusion. Eventually, everybody in town–an uncommonly glum and grim sort of place that could use a dash of fantasy–goes along with it, too.
Someone wrote Lars and the Real Girl. Someone directed it. Someone named Sidney Kimmel–a clothing manufacturer who has decided to become a motion-picture producer–put up the money to make it. Some firm has chosen to distribute it. And it has Ryan Gosling, who showed in The Notebook that he has the chops to be an old-fashioned romantic leading man of the sort Hollywood hasn’t seen since the 1970s.
What were they thinking? What were they drinking/smoking? It would be a relief to know that Lars and the Real Girl was actually made because someone was using the production to run a drug-smuggling operation. At least that would offer a rational explanation for the existence of this positively gobstopping piece of work.
Presumably, these people would say that Lars and the Real Girl is a movie about love–about how Lars’s aching need to love inspires an entire town to an act of self-sacrificing love for one of its own. Still, what we are watching is a man carrying around an anatomically correct sex doll with whom he sometimes has screaming fights in a car in the middle of a forest–even as he is living on the same property with a pregnant woman about to give birth. The doctor tells Lars’s brother that he’s not schizophrenic or psychopathic; but from what we see, that is exactly what he is. Humoring such a person rather than providing him with real help would not be an act of love but an act of madness in itself that could put a vulnerable woman and an innocent infant in severe jeopardy. Lars and the Real Girl is so defiantly peculiar that it has managed to cloud the minds of several otherwise sensible movie critics, who are following Lars’s delusional example in praising the film that contains him. Some are even offering comparisons to Little Miss Sunshine, last year’s wonderful and bracing comedy about American losers. What it has in common with Little Miss Sunshine is that it is a small-budget independent film that was shown at a few fancy film festivals. What it doesn’t have in common with Little Miss Sunshine is that it is awful in very nearly every respect–so awful in its alternately disturbing and mundane way, in fact, that it does not even succeed in achieving the camp effect of being unintentionally funny.
Gosling, however, does achieve a landmark of sorts. He delivers what may be the most mannered performance in the history of film. Gosling is acting here; oh lord, is he acting. He stammers, bumbles, pulls on his hair, clears his throat, wanders around in a little circle–every time he has a line of dialogue to speak. Gosling’s actorly touches, his silent moves, add at least five minutes to the movie’s running time. And yet not a single thing he does is remotely believable or true.
Gosling is so actorish that, in playing a shy and awkward man, he’s furiously, aggressively shy and awkward–which is, of course, exactly the opposite of what a shy and awkward person is really like. This isn’t just a bad performance; it is the independent-film version of Laurence Olivier’s turn as an Orthodox cantor in Neil Diamond’s 1979 version of The Jazz Singer–a car wreck for the ages. Perhaps that is why Lars and the Real Girl exists: to function as a model, to be used in drama schools, of what not to do as an actor and, in film schools, of how not to make a heartwarming indie.
John Podhoretz is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
