6.10.2009

Lars And The Real Girl: What Bologna.

Part of me felt compelled to take this movie seriously, but I can't. When you make a film with such a bizarre concept like Lars and the Real Girl, why would you play by the rules set forth by average Hollywood drivel?


Check it out: socially inept sweetheart (Lars, played by Ryan Gosling, the motivational crackhead teacher from Half Nelson - still a less ridiculous premise than Lars and the Real Girl) buys a plastic sex doll named Bianca to become his real life girlfriend so he can exit his brother's garage and rediscover what it's like to have a life. Suffering from a delusion (or, more accurately, post-traumatic stress disorder from his mother's death that he displaces onto Bianca, the 'girlfriend'), Lars wheels his plastic sex doll girlfriend around in a wheelchair to family dinners, church, a party with coworkers, childhood memory sites, the doctor, and even calls 911 when he thinks Bianca is unconscious and dying.

(Yes, paramedics arrived and took her away without a hint of irony.)

The alarmingly naive (read: unrealistically desperate) real girl, Margo, (Kelli Garner), who falls for Lars, creates a fake relationship with a real person to get Lars's attention. Meanwhile, the community at large is aware of Lars's delusion - so what does the community do? Act like there isn't a problem - like the plastic sex doll Bianca is a beautiful, talking breath of fresh air (who willingly fucks the craziest of guys (Lars)).

...That is, a plastic sex doll who also happens to do volunteer work, like read to little children in a classroom.

I'm not kidding. That's actually a scene in this movie.

...So is the scene where Lars's brother and his brother's wife give the sex doll a bath and debate whether or not it's funny. We'll say it's "meta-funny." It's also the most sexual scene in the entire movie. The filmmakers must have thought that sexualizing the guy who bought a SEX DOLL would make him too creepy to be a sympathetic character, but I dunno. I'm naturally inclined to sympathize with creepy dudes who buy sex dolls off the internet. Aren't you???

And did I mention that Lars and the Real Girl played out like a family friendly Christmas movie - minus the tree - and not like a John Waters comedy? But all along, the other characters say shit like "Is she flexible?" and look up her skirt to find (what I imagined to be) a big scary anatomically correct plastic vagina.

Anyway, you've seen this movie before: it's ET and There's Something About Mary with a splash of Weekend at Bernie's rolled into a (failed) attempt at making the Next Great American Movie. So, it wasn't a bad movie, but now that I'm writing about it, I almost feel like I'd better serve my time ordering a plastic sex doll from the internet and then having lots of sex with it.

Or ya know. Washing dishes. I think I'll go wash some dishes now.