Lazy Direction Deflates Character Study Into Fluffy Hipster Romcom
Director Craig Gillespie’s Lars and the Real Girl is a study of the toll that mental illness can exact upon a person, a subject usually neglected in contemporary cinema. Though anxious to foster sympathy, the film ends up trivializing its dark subject matter by veering into the realm of cute, oversimplified fantasy.
The film’s titular Lars (Ryan Gosling) suffers from intense shyness: uncomfortable around other people and terrified of physical contact. To stifle his loneliness, he purchases a “real doll,” an incredibly lifelike, anatomically correct mannequin (read: sex toy) that he names Bianca. His relationship with the doll is completely innocent and nonsexual, but he nevertheless invents a personal history for it and routinely speaks to it as if it were an actual person. So when his family doctor (Patricia Clarkson) abandons conventional psychology and instructs Lars’ friends and family to indulge him in his delusions, they accept the doll as one of the gang. But as he becomes increasingly unable to monopolize Bianca’s use, Lars grows ever more possessive and resentful of the “life” that it has without him. Of course he eventually gets better, and cue the crowd-pleasing happy ending.
The premise certainly carries the potential for relevance, with its contrast of a seductively impossible ideal versus confronting riskier chances for genuine happiness. Martin Scorsese brilliantly examined a similar conceit in his dark masterpiece The King of Comedy. But dark waters scare the kids, and Gillespie chickens out with trendier fare. The angst is sugar-coated in twee for its audience: fuzzy vintage sweaters, whimsically rugged faces and quaint Rockwellian settings abound. Sure, the intentionally cute and precious trappings make the potentially unsettling subject matter more palatable, but they also distract from Lars’ pain – the heart of the matter. So to remind the viewer of the hero’s distress, Gillespie employs clumsily facile camerawork: shaky, handheld cameras are used when Lars is onscreen, but stationary cameras capture the action when he isn’t. Lars is unstable everyone! Because the camera says so! Do you get it? Do you?
Nancy Oliver’s script provides amateurishly little insight into the cause of Lars’ delusions, doling out occasional crumbs about his mother’s untimely death during childbirth and his anxiety about his sister-in-law’s pregnancy. Millions of unfortunate people grow up without a mother, but there’s no explanation for the extraordinary degree of Lars’s trauma or the outlandish results it compels. Once Bianca arrives, suspension of disbelief goes out the window – nobody makes fun of him for walking around town with a sex toy? The local minister allows it into his church service? And what healthcare provider in the world would admit a sex doll into an emergency room?
Even worse, the dialogue smacks of boilerplate made-for-Lifetime drivel, hitting its nadir when Lars’s sister-in-law (Emily Mortimer) explains the town’s collective decision to serve as an enabler: “All these people love you! We do it for you!”
Despite the glaring scriptural shortcomings, the film could still be salvaged if Gillepsie made the audience care about Lars as a character. Regrettably, Gosling’s synthetic performance consists of a string of overly-rehearsed tics and tells incapable of eliciting anything beyond an occasional bemused grin. It’s a plastic performance for a plastic film. On the bright side Clarkson, quite possibly the most underrated actress around right now, brings much needed gravitas, while Mortimer exudes frustrated compassion as Lars’s pregnant sister-in-law. Kelli Garner is adorable as a goofball co-worker inexplicably smitten with Lars. Oddly the most compelling and genuine scenes occur between Lars and his guilt-stricken older brother Gus (Paul Schneider, in a radical departure from his creepy turn in The Assassination of Jesse James).
By no means the first film to focus on an unsound protagonist, Lars and the Real Girl lacks the palpable tension and desperation of Paul Thomas Anderson’s similar Punch Drunk Love, and doesn’t remotely approach the hopeless anguish of Scorsese’s The Aviator. Admittedly, mental illness is a tough sell, but to cloak such an uncomfortable subject with illusions of universal warmth and acceptance is baldly irresponsible. Rather than take the opportunity to seriously and sensitively foster dialogue, Gillespie exploits a condition by creating a feel-good romcom for the Sundance set.
- Steve Kabel
