Lars and the Real Girl

Nice.  Nice.

So Lars is an anti-social guy.  Kinda weird.  Actually, it turns out he's SUPER weird when he orders a Real Doll and starts insisting "Bianca" is his half Danish half Brazilian girlfriend.  Yeah.  There's a brother who's gruff and mad about the whole thing and who looks like Sylar.  There's a sister in law who's very maternal.  Actually breathing love interest at the office.  Creepy friend as a cubical roommate.  Kind old woman psychiatrist.  And so on.  The plot is predictable - every side character gets a scene or three depending on their importance in which they interact with Bianca and Lars.  Lars ends up falling for the office girl who has had a crush on him since before she appeared on screen, they go on a date, and eventually he finds a way to remove Bianca from the picture.

Lars and the Real Girl is marketed as a comedy, and I guess it is.  It's... light-hearted, I guess.  There are some funny moments.  I think it's less a comedy and more just a story.  A well told story, at that.  Whether or not you like the premise, and I think you do, it's a well told story.  The pace is oddly slow; the moments that could have made for an odd-ball million dollar budget shitty rom-com are instead played for emotion, and it shows.  By the end of the film, I was cheering for everyone even though most of them were pretty one or two dimensional.  The acting, the script, and everything else made me emotionally invested in the characters in a way that not many movies have in the modern day.  I didn't expect everything to work out in the way I do a lot of the time, I really wanted everything to work out.  Spoiler alert:  it did.

Okay, reality check, the premise is stupidly unrealistic.  Lars' "delusion" is weird and more a good gimmick for a movie than something that could actually happen.  Let's suspend our disbelief for that, though, and take one step closer.  If Lars did start dating a Real Doll named Bianca, I don't think the whole town would be so supportive.  Someone would be an asshole and shoot him down.  There's dozens of people working together to support his insanity in the film, and that just seems... not likely.

But maybe that's the message of the movie - people are willing to love and support each other like that.  Maybe we forget how much (most) other people are willing to help when we need them.  We forget how much they care, and how much we care about others.

In the end, it doesn't matter whether the plot is realistic or not, because I believed it enough as I was watching the movie.  The story was told well enough that I didn't notice or care about the plot holes enough to worry about them.  I was too busy thinking about Lars and the people in his life.  Most movies are ridiculously fake, and we go to them for the spectacle.  This is a movie that's just pretty fake, and I watched it to hear the tale and listen to what the writer had to say.  I liked what I heard.

SAM'S VERDICT:  Well told, optimistic, and cute.  Unless you have an aversion to that last one, you'll probably like it.

Also, what is up with these girls I keep seeing in the movies?  Evidently there's some pretty girl in every shy guy's life who is just not noticed by said guy but who would be perfect for him.  Have I always been that oblivious or has Hollywood LIED TO ME YET AGAIN?

...probably both.