Guy and doll

Breakthrough performance by silicone sex toy upstages Ryan Gosling

Gylan Ferguson

Abyss Creations, based out of San Marcos, Calif., produces sex mannequins with pliable silicone “flesh” molded over a skeleton built from the thermal polymer polyvinyl chloride, which, as the doll’s company-edited Wikipedia.com page modestly states, is “arguably state-of-the-art for life-like human body stimulation.” They are known as RealDolls.

Most movie critics would have you believe that Lars and the Real Girl stars the highly (and deservingly) praised Ryan Gosling, but, in fact, its real star is none other than a RealDoll, here called a “Real Girl.” This is not because the doll provides the best performance in the film but because the doll — the flexible, buxom, lazily pouty, “arguably state-of-the-art” doll — is a perfect representation of the film itself. Ultimately, Lars and the Real Girl begins to resemble all too much that woman made of silicone and polyvinyl chloride.

The movie takes place in one of those frozen, little northern U.S. communities where, the moving pictures tell us, residents do nothing but go to church, have town meetings with hot cocoa, and avoid having too much contact with one another.

Lars (Gosling) is emotionally crippled, a little deranged, but altogether kind, and living in the garage of his family home, a home now occupied by his older brother (Paul Schneider) and his older brother’s wife (Emily Mortimer). With a job at some nondescript cubicle maze, seriously unresolved parent issues, and a badass collection of knit sweaters, Lars tries to go through life avoiding human beings as much as possible, warding them off with a tight and painful smile.

One day, Lars orders a Real Girl (RealDoll). Somehow, though he must have ordered and customized her online and she arrives in a crate, Lars manages to convince himself that the doll, named Bianca, is a real person. And here’s the movie’s central deceit: the rest of the town decides to go along with it. Not only Lars’ brother and sister-in-law, who give Bianca a bed, not only the family doctor-psychiatrist (Patricia Clarkson), who sees an opportunity to give the misfit some therapy, but soon the whole town is inviting Bianca to parties, giving her makeovers, and volunteering her for community service.

You could verbally circumnavigate this preposterous and unbelievable scenario by labelling Lars and the Real Girl as a kind of Frank Capra fable — a tale of the triumph of good ol’ all-American kindness towards all human beings, even the silicone ones . . . don’t that just warm your heart?

That’s the plastic conceit at the heart of the film. Far from being creepy or troubling (Lars, as far as we know, never uses his doll for her designed purpose), we’re adamantly instructed that Bianca’s presence is nothing but a healthy pair of relationship training-wheels for Lars. There is even a real-life love interest waiting in the wings for him, a gawky but cute coworker (Kelli Garner), loyal as a dog to her prescribed future lover, who is as fake and prefabricated as Bianca.

What makes the screenplay involving (perhaps even touching)? is some great acting. Ryan Gosling may only be 27, but his work in recent years has inspired critics to hold informal slam-dunk competitions over who can praise him the most. Resisting a “new talent” label — it’s a testament to the originality of his genius. Lars’ shuffle, the heartbreaking look in his eyes, and the timbre of his voice in a scene where he sings Nat King Cole’s “L-O-V-E” in a tree house, hint at so much more than the screenplay ever could have.

It’s not just Gosling, either. Both Schneider, goofily and expertly playing the boy shackled with the chains of manhood, and Mortimer, whose character’s insistence on spreading kindness is almost frighteningly intense, are fantastic.

So this, then, is how Lars and the Real Girl so much resembles its heroine. The film is basically false, a somewhat anatomically correct construction of plastic that is simply not reality. The fine actors give it a kind of imaginary life, much in the same way Lars animates his own fabricated lover. But to enjoy this Hollywood fable requires a suspension of disbelief on the same level as that enacted by the entire northern community.

Maybe I’m saying that watching Lars and the Real Girl is like fucking a piece of silicone. Interpret that how you will.