Lars and the Real Girl Review

The setup sounds like a one joke sketch, and the first real decision the film makes is to refuse the joke. Gosling plays Lars with a stoop and a permanent flinch, speaking in the careful half sentences of a man rationing his own words, and he never winks at the camera. Patricia Clarkson does the quietest work in the picture as the doctor who treats the delusion as grief rather than madness, and Emily Mortimer carries the guilt of a sister in law who understands too late what the household did to him.

Adam Kimmel shoots the Wisconsin winter in flat gray light, all bare trees and pale church basements, which keeps the whimsy anchored to a place that looks genuinely cold. The trouble is the town. Nancy Oliver's script needs a whole community to accept Bianca inside a single scene, and the speed of that turn drains away the friction the story needs.

Nobody mocks Lars for long, nobody profits from him, and the church committee's objection is settled in one line. The picture is strongest indoors, in the scene where Lars asks his brother how he knew he had become a man and gets an answer about doing the right thing when it costs you something.