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Issue 2, 2009
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Reel Review
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Lars And The Real Girl
Bishakha Datta
I was lazily surfing television channels one evening, pausing
here, flickering there. At some point, I broke into a movie
that had already begun. I thought I’d watch it for a while,
then move on. An hour later, I was still glued to the screen,
riveted by a unique relationship between an adult man and
an adult doll – or Lars and the ‘Real Girl’.
In this independent American film directed by Craig
Gillespie, Lars Lindstrom is a young man who appears
dysfunctional in his relationships, or lack of them – he
finds it difficult to interact with or relate to his family, his
colleagues, or his fellow parishioners in the church in his
small town. His pregnant sister-in-law’s persistent attempts
to lure him into a family meal are usually rebuffed, and on
the rare occasions he accepts, their conversation is stilted.
And he experiences severe pain when touched, even
lightly.
Enter Bianca. When this shy young man announces that
Bianca is coming to visit him, his family – brother Gus
and sister-in-law Karin – is thrilled. He’s never ever had
someone visit him, let alone a woman. The excitement lasts
until they meet Bianca – a life-size anatomically-correct doll
who Ryan ordered off the Internet and has given a ‘real’
identity as a wheelchair-bound missionary of Brazilian and
Danish descent. Now they don’t know what to do. Should
they pretend she’s real and play along with Lars’ delusion?
Or should they just get Lars to face reality?
As Gus and Karin try to deal with their dilemma, a
psychologist advises them to treat Bianca as a real woman.
It’s not schizophrenia or a hallucination, she tells them.
It’s a delusion. Meanwhile, freed up from the pressure
to interact by a non-interactive relationship with a doll,
Lars begins to introduce Bianca as his girlfriend to his coworkers
and various townspeople. Aware of the situation,
everyone reacts to the doll as if she were real, and Bianca
soon finds herself involved in volunteer programs, getting
a makeover from the local beautician, and working parttime
as a model in a clothing store. Due to their acceptance
of Bianca, Lars soon finds himself interacting more with
people. And the film goes on, but I’m not telling you where
it ends.
In 2007, Lars and the Real Girl won one Oscar nomination
and numerous other awards in the United States where
it was commercially released. Ryan Gosling expectedly
– and deservedly – won several of these for his tour de
performance as Lars. Gosling is to Lars what Sean Penn is to
Harvey Milk in Milk: he defines the role. He takes over the
character and makes it his own. He is Lars. Nancy Oliver
picked up a bunch of awards for Best Original Screenplay,
while Craig Gillespie was voted Most Promising Filmmaker
by the Chicago Film Critics Association. This was his first
feature film.
It’s one thing to win a bunch of awards. It’s quite another
to be a stand-out film. Lars and the Real Girl stands out for
many reasons. To begin with, the concept of the blow-up
doll. “I had a weird job where I had to deal with a lot of
websites and a lot of lonely guys,” screenwriter Nancy
Oliver told the independent film site, indieLondon in an
interview. “The dolls advertised were so bizarre they stuck
in my head, because you can totally see the reason for
them. How many people do you know who can’t operate
with real human beings?” Related to this is the concept of
how one treats mental illness. “It was a ‘what if?’ thing,”
said Oliver in the same interview. “What if we didn’t treat
our mentally ill people like animals? What if we brought
kindness and compassion to the table?”
If a treatment ethic of kindness and compassion are the
film’s conceptual bulwarks, the treatment of Bianca is itself
one of the highlights. Even though she’s a doll, Bianca is
treated as ‘real’ – in a screen sense. She’s imagined from
the point of view of Lars, who perceives her as real – not
from the point of view of the community, which knows
she’s unreal. Visually, she’s stunning; she doesn’t look alive
as such, but she conforms to the visual standards of the
‘real’ world. So when you see Bianca sitting at the dining
table, she looks like one of the diners – even though she
can’t eat a thing. When she’s wheeled into a party, she looks
like one of the guests – even though she can’t speak to the
rest of them. When she comes out of the salon after a perm,
you notice her haircut.
The beauty of this treatment also lies in shifting the
audience’s gaze – from initially treating her as a plastic doll
to increasingly seeing her as real. Lars and the Real Girl allows
us to be gently amused for a while, as the town’s initial
reaction to Bianca mirrors our own. A doll? But it does
not milk this reaction. Instead of developing into a flatout,
slapstick comedy, it becomes a whimsical allegory that
touches on serious issues related to emotional isolation and
the unacknowledged inability to handle personal loss. (Lars
withdrew into his shell after the death of his parents). As
one viewer posted on the online Internet Movie Database:
“If anyone had told me I would one day be crying during
a movie about a man and his blow-up doll, I would have
called them a liar. But, here I am, going through at least
three Kleenex even after the movie is over.”
Not that Lars and… is a weepfest either. Far from it.
Directorially, it’s all about deft understatement and delicate
direction – why use a sledgehammer when you can use a
feather? The quiet still interiors of Lars’ life are mirrored
in the stillness of the camerawork and the house’s quiet
interiors. Like Lars himself, the movie doesn’t allow itself
to be categorized. It’s not a comedy, nor is it emotional
enough to be called ‘drama’. It’s light and sweet and kind
without being cloying and sentimental. Folded into its layers
is some sort of message about openness and acceptance –
but it doesn’t preach. Neither does it strike a false note.
If there’s one obvious thing that the script avoids, it’s the
sexual thing. Yes, there are scenes with Lars and the Real
Girl lying in bed with one another, but no. Somehow,
we never see them having sex. Neither is sex alluded to
in this relationship, although you can tell that his family
initially thinks that’s what he bought the doll for. It’s
hard to imagine that Lars never thought about Bianca in
a sexual context, but for whatever reason, the film gives
this a miss. Was it because sex with a doll would be seen
as too sordid – and pull audience identification away from
Lars? Who knows? As Manohla Dargis wrote in the New York
Times, “The doll has something hiding under her skirt, but
we never see Lars playing peekaboo because this is a story
about innocence, not sad sacks having their weird way with
artificial vaginas.”
Be that as it may. Despite this one shortcoming, Lars and…
remains a masterpiece of independent cinema. A turn-of-the-
cyber century American epoch, lovingly chronicling
21st century neuroses the way French cinema chronicled
the excesses of the belle époque. In a hundred years of
cinema, there’s never been anything quite like Lars and the
Real Girl. Don’t miss it.
Bishakha Datta is a non-fiction writer and filmmaker who
is currently writing Selling Sex, a book on the lives, realities
and struggles of sex workers in Kolkata, India. Her two
most recent documentary films are In The Flesh and Taza
Khabar. Bishakha is also the executive director of Point of
View, a Mumbai-based not-for-profit organization that
promotes the points of view of women through media, art
and culture.
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