Lars and the Real Girl (***)

This is a comedy that’s far less extreme than its odd premise might suggest. Ryan Gosling is Lars, an emotionally stunted office worker living in a garage next to the home of his older brother. His kindly sister-in-law (Emily Mortimer) is pleased and surprised to learn that Lars will have a companion for the cold Northern winter, but less so when it turns out that Lars’s new friend is Bianca, a love doll ordered off the Internet. I have to admit, this didn’t seem at first to be a promising plot, but I and, I think, most of the screening audience were won over by the unexpected sincerity with which it’s handled.

Yes, it’s a comedy, and a lot of the humor is exactly what you’d imagine, with the delusional but doting Lars treating Bianca just like, yes, a real girl and going through the stages of a relationship. (Sex, apparently, isn’t part of it; Bianca, though anatomically correct, is rather religious and wants to sleep in the house, not with Lars.) But the most obvious gags can only work for 15 minutes. What makes the movie something more is the sweet tale of a boy afraid of adulthood and the surprising reaction of the townspeople. Gosling, one of the few leading men who is effectively a character actor, crucially makes Lars believable. (Oddly, he has the same name as the other fictional Lars I could think of, Phyllis’s unseen husband Lars Lindstrom on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.) Patricia Clarkson plays a doctor/therapist who treats both Lars and Bianca.

IMDB link

reviewed 10/11/07