..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Lars and the
Real Girl
Directed byCraig Gillespie

I saw just under an hour of Lars & The Real Girl a few days ago, having to run out to see another film whose last TIFF screening I had to catch while here. The film was charming and odd and unexpected… the perfect mix for a surprising Toronto Film Fest success.

But when I got back to the film in full today, I was taken somewhere that the first 55 minutes didn’t prepare me for. Lars & The Real Girl is the Feel Good movie of the season.

The basic set-up is that Lars is a freaky shut-in, so disconnected that he can’t even be drawn into his brother and sister-in-law’s house across the lawn (he co-owns the house, but chooses to live in the separate garage) for breakfast or coffee. Ryan Gosling follows up his shiny performance in Half Nelson with a polar opposite here. You can feel Lars’ shoulders hunching and his avoidant focus in every moment.

But the The Real Doll shows up. And it doesn’t seem to be a sex thing. Lars treats the Real Doll, named Bianca, with love and respect. And in turn, others seem inclined to do the same thing.

That’s where this plot description ends, but that gimmick – she’s a doll and they are playing along – is good for an awful lot of laughs and sighs. And then the film starts exploring what is really going on with Lars… and it goes from really quite amusing to a film that starts moving towards a simple grace that touches greatness.

Ironically, Lars, like Juno, the other hopes-to-be-Little Miss Sunshine film this season, could be accused of being somewhat God loving, aka right leaning. In Juno, the teenage girl carries her baby to term. The argument – which seems to forget the term “choice” – is that somehow not getting an abortion at 16 is an exclusively right wing notion. In Lars, the core of the ice-cold northern Midwestern town (which I don’t think is ever specified, though we see license plates, which I guess I should have registered) that helps Lars with his situation is from his church. They are an accepting group, led by a tough older woman (Nancy Beatty as Mrs. Gruner) who opens her heart with the perspective of someone who has seen so much. And when the priest wonders whether to allow Bianca into the church at all, he wonders What Would Jesus Do… and you can be sure rejection is not the answer.

Even more ironically, Lars was written by Nancy Oliver, who is credited with 8 episodes of Six Feet Under (I don’t know how that shop worked… sometimes 8 episodes is really just 8, sometimes the team works over one another’s scripts and then agree to who gets credit for however many), the show created and exec-ed by Alan Ball, who is unfairly under journalistic machine gun fire for his TIFF film, Nothing Is Private. (More on that film later.) Oliver went sweetly and gently to the heart. Ball took out the straight razor.

The supporting cast of Lars & The Real Girl is sterling. Emily Mortimer and Paul Schneider as Lars’ immediate family are naturally relaxed and comfortable together and Mortimer does pregnancy with ease. (They are also both very funny without selling the comedy too hard.) Patricia Clarkson is the embodiment of sweet, healing understanding as The Doctor (who also does psychology… you have to do that as far north as they are). And Kelli Garner does her best to stick out her teeth past the lips she usually features, shoulder shrugs away her bust, and does anti-make-up to try to be the perfectly iced America geek girlfriend wannabe. (She’s seen here with a more glamorous look with an unidentified gentleman.) She succeeds and is as sweet as imaginable in the role.

And leading the whole parade is director Craig Gillespie, who must be thrilled to have this to distract from the long-delayed Weinstein release of Mr. Woodcock, his first film. I haven’t seen the other film, but his work here is simple and solid, and he has to get more than a little credit for every performance hitting its mark so solidly.

It would not be shocking to see Ryan Gosling nominated for Oscar for a second year in a row for this completely unexpected turn that becomes more complex as the film continues. (There is a beat where Lars experiences a moment of clarity and you can read it on Gosling’s face in a performance moment that is both tiny and absolutely stunning. The best of what Gosling offers.)

The biggest challenge is to the newly muscular Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, functional distributor MGM, and new Kimmel aesthetic captain, Bingham Ray. Both Fox Searchlight and Paramount Vantage have fully functioning majors behind them and funding is a impulse buy. Last year’s efforts by the Yari Group for the popular The Ilusionist fell short, a year after indie Lionsgate got Crash all the way to the win. So we’ll see.

But I had that warm, glowing feeling as I sat through the third act of this film… it is so gentle and loving and human. And isn’t that what drove the oddball LMS to an Oscar nod and Indy Spirit win last season? At the very least, Nancy Oliver is going to be seeing Diablo Cody at a lot of awards shows for the next five months.

-David Poland