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Lars and the Real Girl (2007)

So much of how we perceive a film comes down to expectation. If a film is average, yet we have expected it to be poor, it has exceeded our expectations and we therefore feel more positively about it. If we are expecting something dazzling and find it is merely average, we are probably disposed to feel less kindly towards it than towards the ‘better than expected’ film, even where they are of equal quality. It all comes down to the gap between expectation and the actual experience. Perhaps the best policy is to avoid all reviews and prejudgements.
But if you were going to do that you wouldn’t be here reading my reviews thread.
I’ll start by quoting some dialogue:
Gus: What are we doing? Why are we doing this for him?
Karin: Oh, come on. It's funny!
Gus: Is it?
Karin: I don't know. I don't know, maybe not.
Good understated dialogue, which sums up the movie quite accurately. It’s funny. But is it really funny?
Lars (Ryan Gosling) is mentally ill. Largely as a result of his mother dying in childbirth and being shut out by his grieving father and self-absorbed brother. His father now also dead, he lives in the garage of his parents’ house, now occupied by his brother, Gus (Paul Schneider) and his pregnant sister-in-law (Emily Mortimer). He suffers from social anxiety and doesn’t really know how to communicate with people. One day, his workmate shows him an online site where you can buy life size dolls. A little while later, Lars buys one and introduces it to the community as his girlfriend, Bianca.
I have seen this described as a feelgood film. I can see why, it’s kind of sweet how everyone rallies round and helps Lars, pretending to believe his delusion that Bianca is real, and how through this experience Lars learns how to connect with the people around him and how to speak to girls, eventually forming the beginnings of a relationship with another co-worker.
But it didn’t make me feel good. It was just too sad.
There were a few other reasons I didn’t like this film as much as I thought I would. There are the little things – why is Margot, Lars’ co-worker, so besotted with him in the first place? The way that Lars’ fears about his sister-in-law dying in childbirth like his mother are never really resolved. That Lars and Margot get together at Bianca’s funeral struck me as slightly distasteful, even though she wasn’t real, she seemed real to Lars. It was overall (and I hate saying this because it’s the kind of thing that people who only like comic-book action movies say about anything slower paced), a little bit dull. On top of that, I found it a little too self-consciously quirky.
That said, it did have its share of comic and touching moments. The acting was all very good, it would be difficult to pick a stand-out performance although I like Patricia Clarkson as the doctor who counsels Lars under the pretence of giving treatments to Bianca. None of the characters is a cliché or stereotype. I liked the way Lars’ unconventional dependence on his doll was subtly contrasted with the more acceptable attachments his co-workers had to their action figures and teddy bears without this ever being made explicit in the dialogue. It was unusual and, I suppose, thought-provoking.
I know I'm being unduly harsh because I expected to like it more than I did. But I wonder if some of the reviews I read were unduly charitable because they expected from the 'small town man gets sex-doll girlfriend' premise that it would be much worse.
3 and a bit/5

So much of how we perceive a film comes down to expectation. If a film is average, yet we have expected it to be poor, it has exceeded our expectations and we therefore feel more positively about it. If we are expecting something dazzling and find it is merely average, we are probably disposed to feel less kindly towards it than towards the ‘better than expected’ film, even where they are of equal quality. It all comes down to the gap between expectation and the actual experience. Perhaps the best policy is to avoid all reviews and prejudgements.
But if you were going to do that you wouldn’t be here reading my reviews thread.
I’ll start by quoting some dialogue:
Gus: What are we doing? Why are we doing this for him?
Karin: Oh, come on. It's funny!
Gus: Is it?
Karin: I don't know. I don't know, maybe not.
Good understated dialogue, which sums up the movie quite accurately. It’s funny. But is it really funny?
Lars (Ryan Gosling) is mentally ill. Largely as a result of his mother dying in childbirth and being shut out by his grieving father and self-absorbed brother. His father now also dead, he lives in the garage of his parents’ house, now occupied by his brother, Gus (Paul Schneider) and his pregnant sister-in-law (Emily Mortimer). He suffers from social anxiety and doesn’t really know how to communicate with people. One day, his workmate shows him an online site where you can buy life size dolls. A little while later, Lars buys one and introduces it to the community as his girlfriend, Bianca.
I have seen this described as a feelgood film. I can see why, it’s kind of sweet how everyone rallies round and helps Lars, pretending to believe his delusion that Bianca is real, and how through this experience Lars learns how to connect with the people around him and how to speak to girls, eventually forming the beginnings of a relationship with another co-worker.
But it didn’t make me feel good. It was just too sad.
There were a few other reasons I didn’t like this film as much as I thought I would. There are the little things – why is Margot, Lars’ co-worker, so besotted with him in the first place? The way that Lars’ fears about his sister-in-law dying in childbirth like his mother are never really resolved. That Lars and Margot get together at Bianca’s funeral struck me as slightly distasteful, even though she wasn’t real, she seemed real to Lars. It was overall (and I hate saying this because it’s the kind of thing that people who only like comic-book action movies say about anything slower paced), a little bit dull. On top of that, I found it a little too self-consciously quirky.
That said, it did have its share of comic and touching moments. The acting was all very good, it would be difficult to pick a stand-out performance although I like Patricia Clarkson as the doctor who counsels Lars under the pretence of giving treatments to Bianca. None of the characters is a cliché or stereotype. I liked the way Lars’ unconventional dependence on his doll was subtly contrasted with the more acceptable attachments his co-workers had to their action figures and teddy bears without this ever being made explicit in the dialogue. It was unusual and, I suppose, thought-provoking.
I know I'm being unduly harsh because I expected to like it more than I did. But I wonder if some of the reviews I read were unduly charitable because they expected from the 'small town man gets sex-doll girlfriend' premise that it would be much worse.
3 and a bit/5