Blind Prophecy

After spending the day with Jennifer–mostly helping her clean out her closet and de-clutter her apartment–we decided to go see a movie. After watching a trailer for Lars and the Real Girl, we thought a hilarious comedy was just what we needed.

While the movie was great, it was not a hilarious comedy. It was more of an odd tearjerker, with jokes.

100 things a lonely guy can do with a sex doll (and other spoilers) after the jump…

The movie focuses on Lars (Ryan Gosling), a socially awkward young man from a broken family in a tight-knit Midwestern town to the north. His older brother Gus (Paul Schneider) and sister-in-law Karin (Emily Mortimer) are expecting a child. As the movie progresses, we learn that Lars’s mother died giving birth to him, that his father was a broken man and something of a hermit, that his brother abandoned him in the years before his dad eventually died, and that Lars feels physical pain when someone touches him.

All of these issues and more cause Lars to order a sex doll off the internet and immediately begin introducing “Bianca” to his friends and family as his girlfriend, a Christian missionary from Brazil who doesn’t speak much English and is confined to a wheelchair. His brother and sister-in-law, unsure what to make of this, agree to go along with the delusion at the advice of Dagmar (Patricia Clarkson), the town’s doctor and psychologist. Soon, the whole town is joining in. Bianca is accepted at parties, she’s offered a job, volunteers at the hospital, and even gets elected to the school board as everyone helps to make Lars delusion as real as possible. Even Margo (Kelli Garner), the perky and quirky coworker who has a crush on Lars, gets involved.

Meanwhile, Dagmar uses a fake illness in Bianca as an excuse to begin counselling sessions with Lars. He begins to open up to people, lets out some of his feelings, and undergoes a type of exposure therapy to human touch. As Lars becomes more confident in himself (especially after he and Bianca have a fight about her busy schedule), he starts to put pull away from her. First, she refuses to marry him, then her illness gets worse. At the end of the film, Bianca dies while sitting by the lake with Lars and his family. Trust me when I say that at this point in the film, everyone–in the town and audience alike–feels as though a real person has actually died.

There are two scenes that stand out especially strongly for me. The first one involved Lars and Margo on a bowling trip. Margo has just broken up with a guy because she didn’t find him “interesting enough,” and Lars comforts her. She invites him to go out while Bianca is busy at a school board meeting. A group of Gus’s coworkers show up and join them. As the group laughs and high-fives each other through the game, Lars almost tears up with happiness at the same time as he struggles to participate. It reminded me of some of my own moments of breaking through childhood shyness and social anxiety. In fact, I remember a bowling trip in high school with a group of people who weren’t close friends, but I was overwhelmed by the fact that I was still a part of a group, that I could have fun with people who simply accepted me whether I was a great conversationalist or not.

The other scene that amazed me was after Bianca got really sick. A group of women from Lars’s church show up with casseroles and knitting. Lars asks them what he’s supposed to do, and they tell him not to do anything. They’ve come over “to sit,” because that’s what people do during tragedies. One woman asks if Lars feels better, and he says yes. Again, such a mundane and non-dramatic way of communicating such a common cultural truth. Being with other people through tough times is better than being alone. And the community rallies behind Lars’s delusion to teach him simple lessons about human kindness and connection, as if teaching a child.

The movie is all about human connections. It’s also about how we can feel great love and affection for our friends and neighbors without realizing how much they are hurting. Much of the reason the town goes along with the Bianca delusion is that Lars is sending out the clearest possible distress signal he could, and they feel guilty that they let is get this bad. Yes, they knew he was awkward and lonely, but none of them knew how to help or knew how bad off he was.

Yes, the movie has some great comedy to it, but its overall tone is that of a drama. The performances are amazing. Gosling’s portrayal of Lars is spot-on and worthy of award consideration. Schneider and Clarkson both create compelling characters who are all the more believable because (unlike most Hollywood performances) you never feel like they’re trying to steal a scene. Both should be nominated for Best Supporting Actor awards, because I never, ever thought I was looking at great actors on the screen, I completely believed in these people. Unfortunately, the other women, Garner and Mortimer, did fine jobs but felt ultimately two-dimensional.

The movie was a bit slow in parts and the artistic element of the movie were nothing spectacular. The strength of the film was in the screenplay and the performances, not the direction or cinematography. Still, a good film and surprisingly tender. I’ll give it three-and-a-half naughty things you buy online out of five, deducting points only because of the films duller moments and the massively misleading trailer designed to trick a crowd looking for Dane Cook humor into a sappy family flick with a Lifetime television sensibility.

Filed under: movies by Jere Keys