Lars and the Real Girl

2007 drama (romantic comedy?)

Rating: 10/20

Plot: Lars is a guy who lives in a garage and is sick and tired of his older brother being the sibling everybody talks about. So he devises a plan to trick people into thinking he's delusional so that he can get all the attention in the small town they live in. He purchases a sex doll and pretends to think that she's his new girlfriend, a shy busty nurse in a wheelchair. Everybody takes the bait, and Lars finds new popularity and happiness. After the townspeople realize they've been duped, they tear apart Bianca (the doll) and use her plastic arms and legs to bludgeon him and leave him for dead.

Ryan Gosling's performance was fine, I suppose, but I really never bought that he had a mental disorder and really thought the doll was real. I also was never sure what I was watching. Dramatic comedy, I guess, but there was very little drama and nothing at all was funny once you've seen the guy sitting at a dinner table with a sex doll. You can put a crazy guy in different places (hospital waiting room, forest, car, church) with a sex doll, but it's eventually not going to stop being funny. I did laugh twice, but one of those times was because of bad acting during a scene that was supposed to be sad and the other time was because I thought my toe looked really funny. To me, it seemed like an hour and fifty minute trailer for a fake movie instead of a real movie. Not especially well written, but at least the writer never went for cheap laughs. In different hands, this could have easily gone from not very good to horrifyingly stupid.

Unlike the "real girl," I am anatomically incorrect:

1 comment:

SinlessTouch said...

i kind of liked this movie. The sex doll did change a lot of lives in Lars' town. I was kind of confused if it was drama or comedy though.