Lars and the Real Girl is a lovely little indie dramedy about Lars Lindstrom (
Ryan Gosling), a shy and introverted man in a quiet Midwestern town who shocks his friends and family when he introduces them to his girlfriend, Bianca--who just so happens to be a Real Doll. The town struggles to cope as Lars carts 'Bianca' around in a wheelchair and purports to hear her saying things to him. From the concept and even the trailer, you expect
Lars and the Real Girl to be replete with sex jokes and full-on quirk of the
Napoleon Dynamite magnitude, but it is anything but. Instead, this script by
Nancy Oliver (
Six Feet Under) it is a delicate, bittersweet, and often sad story of a lost, fragile man and the people who love him. Not surprisingly, Gosling is pitch perfect, oozing painful vulnerability down to his twitching eyes and innocently hopeful gazes. What's really lovely about
Lars and the Real Girl, though, is that while it is firmly an indie, it is unself-consciously so, with more attention dedicated to the painful pleasure of yearning for Lars' situation to resolve than to succombing to the temptation of quirk for quirk's sake. The hardest thing to believe isn't that Lars thinks Bianca is real, but that this stunner was directed by
Craig Gillespie--the man behind
Mr. Woodcock. It just goes to show you that things aren't always what they seem.
ReelzChannel Rating: 