Lars and the Real Girl

What’s the Story?

At the start of LARS AND THE REAL GIRL, Lars (Ryan Gosling) looks out on a bleak, wintry landscape. He's isolated and alone, even though he lives adjacent (albeit in a garage) to his brother Gus (Paul Schneider) and his pregnant sister-in-law, Karin (Emily Mortimer).Lars, who works in a generic cubicle at a generic office, can pass for merely socially awkward. But when his co-worker Margo (Kelli Garner) develops a crush on him, he's unable to respond. Instead, he turns to a porn Web site, where he orders a lifelike sex doll. She arrives in a box, and he names her Bianca and introduces her to Gus and Karin as his long-distance girlfriend who's come to visit. With eyebrows raised and glances exchanged, they go along with him, suggesting that they all take Bianca to see Dr. Berman (Patricia Clarkson). Kindly and wise in the way that small-town doctors tend to be in the movies, she advises letting Lars gradually work out whatever trauma he's apparently feeling. "Chances are," she says, "he's been decompensating for some time."

Is It Any Good?

The townsfolk rally round Lars, accepting Bianca as a "real girl," inviting her to parties, volunteering her for community service, bringing her to the hospital to visit with sick kids, etc. But even as it celebrates the healing powers of quirk, Craig Gillespie's movie is premised on some tedious and seemingly comforting truisms related to the "unfathomable" mysteries of women and pregnancy. Bianca, for all her blankness, is a vehicle for Lars' reintegration into the community. While it's disheartening that she must follow a typical plot route in order to serve that function, the film features an appealing performance by Gosling.