Lars and the Real Girl (2007)

Ah, whimsy. What would life be without it? Dark, cold and cynical most likely. Even to a bitter pessimist like myself, that sounds pretty terrifying. Lars and the Real Girl, on the other hand, portrays a world that is ALL whimsy, and let me tell you, it’s a far more unrecognizable and frightening world.

In Lars' world everyone is nice and knows one another. They all go to church. They sing in the choir. It’s a place where a lonely man can pretend a life-sized sex doll is a real woman and not one person makes a mean spirited remark. As a matter of fact, the townsfolk are so unbelievably kind they too begin treating the sex doll like it’s a real person! Someone needs to make public the coordinates of this mystical village so we can firebomb it before whatever “kindness germ” they all are infected with contaminates the real world, and gross concepts like “peace” and “understanding” start to flourish.

Ahem, anyway, the story is about Lars (played with twitchy sincerity by Ryan Gosling), a introverted recluse who purchases a life-sized sex doll and pretends it’s his girlfriend. Instead of telling Lars that his paramour is, in fact, plastic and latex instead of flesh and blood, his brother and sister-in-law, on doctor’s instructions, play along and convince the entire town to play along as well. And everyone does! With little to no resistance!

And there within lies the problem. Lars and the Real Girl is so unfortunately divorced from reality that it is hard to take the drama seriously. While it contains moments of tender emotion and a few mild laughs, the movie is so bogged down by its own syrupy sweetness that it fails to leave much of an impression or even make much sense.

It’s almost inconceivable how someone like Lars, who is surrounded by loving neighbors, could possibly end up so alone he resorts to a sex doll for companionship. His sister-in-law (an adorable Emily Mortimer) and brother are constantly inviting him over for breakfast or dinner, he gets invited to parties by his co-workers and even the new girl at work inexplicably has the hots for him!

The movie is missing a much needed edge. Lars is bat-shit crazy, but the only time this is truly apparent is when he tells his doctor (Patricia Clarkson, reserved to the point of banality) that it burns when people touch him. (And even that nugget of info is quickly forgotten about.) Otherwise Lars just ambles around like a bashful, pouty Napoleon Dynamite. The movie couldn’t even let a group of hardware store employees get in a quip about the sex doll more biting then “Does she have a sister?” Har, har… har. I mean, for Christ’s sake, Lars doesn’t even try to have sex with the sex doll! It’s a SEX DOLL!!!! How neutered can this movie get!

Besides that minor improbable innocence, there is also a strange irony to the way the movie plays out that I’m not sure director Craig Gillespie (who also has Mr. Woodcock on his short resume) or screenwriter Nancy Oliver (who penned a handful of Six Feet Under episodes) intended. Throughout the movie the audience is encouraged to laugh at how ridiculous Lars looks carting around and engaging this doll as if it were real. We are being told to point and laugh at him while the characters in the movie are doing everything to try to understand and comfort him. Unfortunately for the movie, after the fourth or fifth time, the joke is no longer funny and even makes the viewer feel kind of mean spirited for laughing when everyone else is compassionate.

You might think I’m being too hard on this trifle of a movie but I’m not sympathetic. Lars and Real Girl is a blatant attempt to mine the “cutsie indie flick” hysteria of late spurred on by the success of superior movies like Little Miss Sunshine and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. However, where those movies retained some sort of basis in reality, Lars and the Real Girl is about as believable as a pair of fake breasts on a plastic sex doll.

DVD Reviews: American Hardcore (2006) and Half Nelson (2006)

American Hardcore (2006)

Watching American Hardcore, a documentary directed by Paul Rachman about the underground American punk scene from 1981-1986, is like being bludgeoned over the head with a baseball bat repeatedly for an hour and a half. Like the musical scene itself, the blaring riffs and frantic concert footage assault your ears and eyes without mercy, but the point is lost amid the violence.

The documentary is successful in as many ways as it is ineffective. It tries to include every band that made a ripple in the underground punk scene in an obsessive-compulsive quest to not leave anyone out. It shows how bands in each major city in the country took what they heard coming out of Los Angeles and made it their own by tweaking a sound, adding their individual angst, and together, making up a unique grassroots musical phenomenon.

However, because of this quest to be the definitive, all-inclusive history of the scene, it gets lost amid the concert flyers, band pins and patches. After hearing numerous stories of fighting with the cops and how each band slept on countless linoleum floors like selfless Buddhist monks on a holy pilgrimage, the tales begin to lose their meaning. Why were kids doing this? What was the purpose? Why did they hate their parents, the cops and most forms of authority? Every talking head tells you these traits were indicative of the scene, but like being a victim of an assault, the fillm leaves you curious why it ever happened in the first place.

Half Nelson (2006)

Ryan Gosling’s performance in Half Nelson as Dan Dunne, a Brooklyn school teacher stuck in the strangle hold of addiction, is one of the most powerful performances of the year.

After he is discovered smoking crack in the girl’s locker room by his student, Drey, Dan fights to keep the two sides of his life from interfering with one another. Drey, played by Shareeka Epps, is a lonely kid whose family life consists of a brother in prison, a long-gone father, a mother who works double-shifts, and a drug dealer "uncle". Up against considerable odds, Drey is looking for a role model and befriends her troubled teacher. Together, both Dan and Drey give one another the strength to confront their considerable troubles.

Gosling is an actor known for choosing challenging roles with conflicting sides to their personalities, and, as in his previous role in the film The Believer, about a Jewish neo-Nazi, here he finds similar success depicting a character stranded between two antagonistic forces. However, this time, Gosling gives a much more subtle performance. The anguish Dan feels by being unable to save Drey from her environment and his inability to shake his own addiction is evident not by a grandiose gnashing of teeth. Instead Dan’s face becomes slack, his limp expression masking the feud raging beneath the surface. The only portals into his emotions are his eyes, which are dark pools of longing for a better, more sober, existence. It’s these small details that make his character believable and the quiet torment roiling within that makes his portrayal heartbreaking.

Epps (who also played Drey in director Ryan Fleck’s short-film version of this story, 2004's Gowanus, Brooklyn) has a kind of presence and knowingness that far more experienced actors struggle vainly to find. However, it is Gosling’s portrayal of a teacher's mental and physical struggle that anchors the picture.

Half Nelson manages to evade the easy templates of the “Dedicated Teacher, Troubled School” genre, however, it is not perfect: a third-act scene with Dan going home to visit his mom and dad who are wine-swilling ex-hippies with long ago abandoned utopian dreams and a comfortable middleclass existence sketches his self-medicating pathology in simplistic brush strokes. And the improbable ways in which Drey’s uncle arranges for Drey to deliver drugs to Dan in some ugly motel in the outskirts of the borough stretches the films credibility.

The film also deals with larger issues then the two characters at its center. Dan’s dialectic philosophy, a concept that everything is made of opposing forces, gives the filmmakers room to discuss political topics like the prison riots at Attica or the assassination of Harvey Milk and allows Gosling’s character to contemplate if one person’s efforts can truly make a difference in other people’s lives. The philosophy is the films central concept. What’s the point of teaching, let alone existing, if one person cannot make a difference in another? And if making a difference is impossible, why not just buy drugs and check out?