Rubber Soul Mate

A man and a doll make quite the couple in Lars and the Real Girl.

by Sam Adams

Recommended

BALL OF MY LOVE: Lars (Ryan Gosling) bowls pink in honor of his doll. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

There are so many reasons why Lars and the Real Girl shouldn't work that it's a small miracle it does. The script, by Six Feet Under scribe Nancy Oliver, is swimming in indie-quirk tics, and based on the kind of outlandish, yet on-the-nose premise that makes viewers feel they've experienced something "original" without actually forcing them to rethink anything at all.

Ryan Gosling plays Lars Lindstrom, a sheepish, withdrawn bachelor who lives in the garage apartment opposite his late parents' house, currently occupied by his older brother, Gus (Paul Schneider), and his pregnant wife, Karin (Emily Mortimer). Evidently scarred by the recent death of his father, and more primally, by his mother's death in childbirth, Lars has withdrawn into a practically catatonic state, recoiling from human contact and barely tolerating the presence of others. The first time we see him, he's staring out the frosted window of his front door, pressing a blanket to his lips, doubly insulated from the world outside.

Lars isn't alone, exactly. His sister-in-law literally tackles him in her zeal to get him to accept dinner invitations, and a pretty blond co-worker (Kelli Garner) awkwardly flirts with him whenever she manages to catch his eye. But Lars shrinks from the merest hint of intimacy, holed up in the dim whiteness of his barely furnished room.

All that changes when he meets Bianca, a raven-haired beauty with full lips and a slender physique. A former nun and missionary of mixed Brazilian and Danish extraction, she is outgoing where Lars is shy, talkative where he is reticent. At least, that is, according to Lars. To everyone else, Bianca appears to be a 5-foot doll made of plastic and rubber, one whose original purpose has nothing to do with companionship.

Had Lars been filmed in the brightly lit, geometrically composed style that might be called "Sundance smirk" (or, alternatively, Wes Anderson lite), this would be the point at which you either flee the theater or start bashing your forehead against the seat in front of you. But Craig Gillespie, a former commercial director making his not-quite debut (depending on whether you count the heavily reshot Mr. Woodcock), plays it utterly straight, shooting in an unobtrusive style that brings out the script's resonances with classic Hollywood fables. Despite the fact that its dramatis personae includes an anatomically correct hunk of rubber, Lars and the Real Girl has more in common with It's a Wonderful Life — or, more pointedly, Harvey — than any modern grotesque.

Of course, you can't make a Harvey without a Jimmy Stewart, and Gosling proves himself up to the task. With his bushy, ill-trimmed moustache and dorky sweaters, Lars seems at first like a parody of a socially inept loner, but Gosling never allows Lars' delusion to slip into mere kookiness. Disturbing without being creepy (no mean feat, given the context), he paints Lars as a heartsick boy who is terrified to grow up, not because (like so many recent movie heroes) he can't bear to put away childish things, but because he associates sexual maturity with death. The movie superfluously introduces a nurturing psychologist (Patricia Clarkson) to explain the terms of Lars' psychosis, but leaves mercifully unstated the link between Lars' breakdown and his sister-in-law's pregnancy.

That's not to say Oliver is stingy with psychoanalytic signifiers. Like the blanket Lars presses to his lips, the room where he insists Bianca be quartered was formerly his mother's, its matching pink wallpaper and bedspread suggesting a life-size doll's house. He even picks out a pink ball at the bowling alley.

But the movie treats Lars like a character, not a case study. As he sits with his brother in their childhood kitchen, the latter nervously picking crumbs from his place mat as they make halting attempts at conversation, it's clear they're cut from the same cloth. Strange as he is, Lars is just farther out on the same spectrum, not a freak singularity.

As Lars' relationship with Bianca begins to seem incurable, the people of his snowy, unnamed town begin to gather round them both, integrating her as if she were as real as Lars believes. She gets a job in a hair salon, goes to church, even does a little volunteer work, until it's not clear if the town is curing Lars of his delusion or being infected by it. It would be easy to brush off the movie's latter half as a sugarcoated fairy tale, but Gosling makes Lars' pain too real to be ignored, and there's something deeply moving about the town's willingness to embrace both Lars and Bianca. It's a reminder of the welcoming spirit that used to flow through American movies, and that rarely appears now except in its most cartoonish incarnation. Despite its outré premise, Lars and the Real Girl is a deeply conservative movie, and in the best possible way.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Lars and the Real Girl

Directed by Craig Gillespie, An MGM release