Movie Mondays: Lars and the Real Girl

          Welcome back to Movie Mondays, circa 2010! Usually I review adult films every Monday but have decided to change things around for the new decade and include exceptional mainstream films about sex and relationships in the Movie Monday mix along with adult fare. Everyone I know who watches porn is, interestingly enough, also a mainstream cineast - so hopefully broader content will appeal just as much as broad content. Enjoy!
      
       Last week I saw an ad for for a National Geographic show called "Strange Love", part of their “Taboo” series, which promised an interview with a guy in love with his love doll.
       Normally a televisual feast like this would prove to me there is a Santa Claus but since I haven’t been able to find it in the listings I decided to do what every film junkie I know has been telling me to do since 2007 and watch “Lars and the Real Girl.” Since it's about a guy who’s in love with his love doll I thought it would be a good tide-over.
       It turned out to be more than that. It was the best 105 minutes I’ve spent in front of a screen – awake – in weeks.
       Loner Lars Lindstrom (Ryan Gosling) does his best, in his quiet gentle way, to keep the people in his life at arm’s length. His sister-in-law Karin pushes invitations on him, his co-workers try to engage him, a young colleague flirts, but Lars prefers his own company. Until he buys Bianca.
       Bianca is a Real Doll but brilliantly, instead of doing what most guys would do with a Real Doll, Lars takes her to Karin and Gus (his brother), introduces her as his girlfriend – in fact, as a very religious, modest, handicapped girlfriend who is new to America (here they are in church). Lars seems to be fully immersed in the delusion that Bianca is real and his family, at the behest of a therapist, goes along with it. Everybody does. Eventually Bianca, despite her fragile medical state (invented by Lars) garners a fuller social life than Lars has.       
       This could have been one protracted 8-th grade goof on Inflate-a-Mates, but director Craig Gillespie (The United States of Tara) and writer Nancy Oliver (True Blood; Six Feet Under) made it a sublime study of the elaborate psychological bridges we construct to get to each other, the nature of love and intimacy and how a little “So what?” can go a really long way.
       Lars won scads of awards and an Oscar nomination and not surprisingly – it’s the freshest thing I’ve seen in some time and the job Ryan Gosling does of interacting with his “girlfriend” is transfixing. The  only ‘adult’ thing about it in that not one moment in it proves to be gratuitous – in the age of overstimulus, that’s an achievment in itself. Two silicone thumbs up. 

Comments

  1. DavecatJanuary 14, 2010 at 2:22 PM

    pssst... that episode of Nat.Geo's 'Taboo' series is due to air Wednesday, 10 February, at 10pm. Or so I hear. :-)

    ReplyDelete

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