"Lars and the Real Girl"

Ryan Gosling has not yet done a movie that I didn’t like. “Stay” is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen, bar none. He was excellent in Fracture”. He’s shaping up, in my opinion, to be one of the “greats”.

I rented “Lars and the Real Girl” on the strength of his starring role alone. I was not disappointed. He played the character with an endearing quirkiness.

You’d think that a story about a man falling in love with what amounts to a “sex doll” would be just plain silly. If it were that kind of movie I wouldn’t be writing about it now. I wouldn’t have sat through five minutes of something along those lines.

Instead Gosling treats us to one of his best performances. It could not have been easy for him to make the character of Lars seem like anything more than a total crackpot. Yet he pulls it off. He makes you care about this guy. He plays him with dignity. He never overdoes the “mentally ill thing”. Instead he makes you want to look deeper into Lars’ psyche to find out what makes him tick (as opposed to “what makes him the way he is”).

“Lars and the Real Girl” is worth seeing, but it does try too hard to guide the viewer into however many layers of meaning and allegory it undoubtedly has. Most of them are easy enough to suss out without the overt “clues” given. No one in their right mind would take this tale seriously if they didn’t know that symbolism was going to share the bill with the lead. It’s not subtle, even if it IS thought provoking.