In “Lars and the Real Girl,” Ryan Gosling plays a guy in love with an anatomically correct
life-size sex doll – an imaginary friend with benefits.
It’s a premise as fanciful as Jimmy Stewart’s “Harvey,” and yet the movie has a sweetness that manages to be pixilated and plausible at the same time. After Lars uncrates his polyurethane fantasy, he introduces her as Bianca – half-Danish, half-Brazilian, and according to some women at the beauty shop who have looked under the hood, all girl. Up until this moment, he has managed to live almost completely off the grid of anyone’s attention in a small Midwestern town.
What makes “Lars” clever instead of cloying is the pitch-perfect script by Nancy Oliver, whose previous experience bringing the inanimate to life was on the HBO series “Six Feet Under.” If her slightly deranged premise seems likely to remind people of such whacked-out brainteasers by Charlie Kaufman as “Being John Malkovich” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” her movie also has a body temperature warmth that Kaufman’s subzero cinema lacks.
After a difficult childhood, Lars (Gosling) has been hiding out in the garage apartment next to the house in which he and his brother Gus (Paul Schneider) grew up. And where Gus still lives with his aggressively friendly wife, Karin (Emily Mortimer). Lars is the kind of guy who wears a tie under a crew neck sweater every day at work; if there were a way for him to make himself as invisible as that tie, he would do it.