Lars Lindstrom (Ryan Gosling) is looking for love in Lars and the Real Girl. (George Kraychyk/Sidney Kimmel Entertainment)
It reads like the premise for a gross-out comedy: a lonely guy buys a sex doll online and pretends that she’s his girlfriend. But a more nuanced and gentler sensibility is at work in Lars and the Real Girl. Ryan Gosling (Half Nelson, Fracture) anchors the film with a sweet and utterly irony-free performance, his preternatural charisma dulled by a hangdog moustache and a Goodwill bin’s worth of pilly, snowflake sweaters. A soft-hearted but emotionally locked-down loner, Lars is so incapable of connection that human touch literally burns his skin.
His solution is to start dating “Bianca,” a stacked, Brazilian-Swedish, convent-raised missionary (at least that’s Lars’s imaginative backstory for her) who has been built to order and shipped in a wooden crate to his American Midwest backwater. On the advice of the local doctor/psychologist (a winsome Patricia Clarkson), the salt-of-the-earth locals, led by Lars’s nonplussed brother and sister-in-law (Paul Schneider and Emily Mortimer), try to take it in stride.
In playing along with Lars, they might cure him of his trauma-induced delusions. But along the way, this communal act of altruism has a transformative effect on the entire town. The temptation with absurd material like this is to wrap everything in quotation marks, but a soulful script by former Six Feet Under writer Nancy Oliver and assured direction by first-timer Craig Gillespie keep this sincere and witty little gem on the right side of quirky.
Lars and the Real Girl screens Sept. 10 and 13 at the Toronto International Film Festival.
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