Lars and the Fake Movie

[October 24th, 2007]

At first blush, it’s hard to believe Craig Gillespie has directed both Lars and the Real Girl and Mr. Woodcock in the same year. The movies share slightly risqué premises—Ryan Gosling’s Lars brings home a sex doll as his new girlfriend; Seann William Scott discovers his mother is sleeping with sadistic gym teacher Mr. Woodcock—but otherwise couldn’t appear more contradictory. Woodcock is the sort of loud, crass comedic dreck that clogs multiplexes in the dog days of summer, while Lars is an idiosyncratic celebration of human kindness, so sensitive it hurts. How could these two movies come from the same mind? It’s puzzling enough to make a critic dump that old auteur theory once and for all.

The initial solution, of course, is to note that Gillespie didn’t direct both movies, not really: New Line Cinema took one look at the test-audience reactions to the first cut of Woodcock and brought in Wedding Crashers director David Dobkin for weeks of reshoots. (This is how Hollywood works, kid: They don’t like your movie, they make it into another movie. Them’s the breaks.) This defeat has positioned Gillespie fairly advantageously; Lars and the Real Girl is delicate and well-intentioned enough that he can be lauded for finding his deeper talent. But this redemption narrative, while tempting, ignores serious problems with Lars —deficiencies that have a lot in common with Mr. Woodcock , actually.

Both movies are, for starters, set in close-knit small towns that bear not the slightest resemblance to actual small towns. The location of Lars is never specified: The film was shot in Ontario, but the intended impression is of Everytown, U.S.A. The actual impression is that we have wandered into the Land of Astoundingly Ugly Sweaters, a place where the locals distinguish themselves from outsiders by wearing homemade clothes with stripes and polka dots. Everyone attends church (no denomination specified) each Sunday, no one betrays an accent (this proves especially difficult for the actor Paul Schneider), and people band together in times of minor crisis. “This is what people do when tragedy strikes,” says a casserole-bearing church lady. “They come over and sit.” Ah. I always wondered what people do.

The larger difficulty facing Lars and the Real Girl , besides being set in a fake town, is that it has a fake hero—one more outlandish than anything in a big-budget comedy. What kind of emotionally damaged man buys an anatomically correct Real Doll on the Internet, declares that it is his religiously conservative girlfriend Bianca, and asks his brother and sister-in-law if Bianca can stay in the guest room? He would have to be a deeply troubled individual. But to be in Gillespie’s whimsical heartwarmer, he also has to be sweet and charming—ideal dating material, if not for that whole deranged talking-to-a-plastic-woman thing. I watched Ryan Gosling’s performance with a kind of dumbstruck awe, wondering exactly what he was doing with his bulging eyes, hesitant speech and eager overbite. And then it hit me: He was doing an impersonation of Andy Kaufman’s Latka from Taxi .

Not everything in the movie is quite as ludicrous as Gosling’s performance. Schneider and Emily Mortimer, as Lars’ bewildered relatives, do the best they can to find the proper emotional register while playing scenes with an uncanny, blank-faced co-star. I mean Gosling, of course. Bianca is pretty convincing.