Lars and the Real Girl

All right, this is a movie about a young man who orders a life-size sex doll online, and believes that it’s a real, flesh-and-blood woman. That could be the set-up for either a serial-killer movie or a bad Adam Sandler comedy. But instead, the filmmakers took the cute-yet-dramatic route, giving us a story that is predictable, yet still works better than one would think.

The trouble with Lars, the guy with his name in the title, is that he’s painfully shy and has difficulty interacting with the small town community around him, including Lars’s brother and pregnant sister-in-law. It’s enough to make people concerned, but no one is truly alarmed until Lars’s sex-doll Bianca arrives, and Lars shows her around. That’s when it’s apparent that maybe, just maybe, there might be something a little more wrong with Lars than being introverted.

Lars and Bianca are quickly taken to a family doctor/psychologist who starts seeing Lars regularly, under the pretext of giving Bianca treatments for low blood pressure. One would think that the good doctor would load Lars up with enough medication to make a cow hallucinate, but instead she advises the brother and sister-in-law to play along with Lars’ delusion.



And since the local community cares about Lars so much, they decide to go along with it as well and treat Bianca the same way they’d treat an actual human being. They get into the act so much that Bianca is soon working at volunteer programs, getting makeovers with the girls, and working part-time as a model at a local clothing store. Clearly, this is a small-town from the same era as Leave It To Beaver, and has never had to deal with life during the Bush administration.

The plot also involves a co-worker of Lars who has a thing for him, and is apparently one of the rare breed of women who likes shy guys who don’t talk much and keep to themselves. Of course, Lars starts dating her by the end of the movie, because that’s just how these things go.

But sometimes there’s nothing wrong with an ending that’s so predictable. The journey to get there still works, and Lars and The Real Girl is honestly a fun movie that’s worth taking a look at.



- Nate