Lars and the Real Girl - heart-warming

Here's another film that's been sitting at the edge of my film-dar for ages.  On my Lovefilm list for years and finally released into the rental market just the other week, but lent to me by a friend recently so I don't have to wait for them to send it.  In your face Lovefilm / Amazon.

Lars and the Real Girl stars Ryan Gosling in a role before he was super-famous.  Here is plays a socially introverted young man living in the garage of the house that was left to him and his brother by their dead parents.  His elder brother and wife live in the main house, and despite their constant badgering of him to move in with them, he insists on his hermit-like existence in the outhouse.  We see him going about his life, working in an office bookishly shying away from people and not talking to the girl who's obviously interested in him.  Then in a strange turn, Lars spots an advert for blow up dolls, and before you know it he has ordered one and introduces 'her' to his family as his new girlfriend.

This is a film about community and human spirit.  We first see Lars' family first react very badly to what he has done, but then on the advice of his doctor they agree to put aside their awkwardness and play along with him for his own benefit.  The whole town eventually gets behind him, pretending that 'Bianca' is real.  They invite her to parties and pretend to get drinks for her, hoping all the time that Lars will eventually come out of his shell.  Where it goes from here, I will leave the reader to find out for themselves.

It's a touching film that wants to be about community and how people can bind together and help each other out in a crisis.  That's all very noble, but at the same time though it's a film felt more about people needing to conform to the norm, and that Lars needs 'help' to get him to do that.  Lars' behaviour is always portrayed as outside of the normal, disruptive and something that needs correcting.  Let's not forget either that Lars is being played by Ryan Gosling, who by most peoples' standards is a very good-looking guy.  Perhaps if all social introverts looked like Ryan Gosling they'd all have much more success getting society to change its ways around them.  The trouble is that most people like Lars look like an untalkative version of Bill Gates on a really bad hair day, and I doubt that the whole community would rally around that person if they started parading a blow up sex doll around the street in a wheelchair.

So overall, Lars and the Real Girl is a nice idea and it's well-executed.  The feel of the movie it spot-on - all the scenes in the small northern US town look suitably cold in the exteriors and equally homely in the interiors.  My reservations are about the contradiction between what the story seems to want to say, and what I feel it's actually saying.  One that's definitely worth watching though.