Hey, everyone. “Moriarty” here.

I didn’t see MR. WOODCOCK. I heard horror stories about the production of the film while it was in production, things about extended shooting. And then some reshooting. And perhaps a bit more. Rumors. And it just sounded like a grind. I wasn’t familiar with the director, but comedy is one of those genres where too many cooks can definitely screw things up. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe MR. WOODCOCK was a vacation, a romp, a joy for everyone on the crew and in the cast, an untroubled production that resulted in a robust and hearty comedy. Maybe. Cause like I said... I didn’t see it.

So I don’t really have an opinion about Craig Gillespie yet. I don’t even know if you can hold MR. WOODCOCK against him. When I walked into my screening of LARS AND THE REAL GIRL last week, I wasn’t expecting anything from it. Not good, not bad... no expectation at all.

And it kicked my ass.

LARS AND THE REAL GIRL is a great, sweet, rewarding movie that marks the moment I stopped respecting Ryan Gosling more than I liked him. Up till now, he’s been an actor I can admire, but who I didn’t feel a particular affinity for. I never connected with the films he was in. For what it is, THE NOTEBOOK remains one of his most complete roles. Obviously, THE BELIEVER was an announcement, and seeing it at Sundance, the energy around Gosling then was tangible. In this film, Gosling does the sweetest work of his career, and he creates an original character, this lovely fragile lonely man. Nancy Oliver (the real creator of the character, of course) proves to be a voice to contend with based on the deceptive depth of her character work. You could watch LARS as a simple sort of surface comedy, and it works on that level. It’s a pretty good mainstream comedy. But it works as a real character film, and everyone here

I have to give a sort of wholesale admiration to anyone who can take something as inherently creepy and gross as a sex doll and turn it into the center of a movie that is wise, generous, and incredibly sweet-natured. In this case, writer Nancy Oliver and director Craig Gillespie both deserve the credit.

It’s her script that deftly avoids most of the pitfalls of this type of story, somehow making potentially creepy material not only palatable but affecting, universal. Her time writing for SIX FEET UNDER, one of the most tonally difficult shows on television, must have served her well. She manages this sophisticated juggling act with aplomb, and she gives her entire cast something to do, not just the star. That’s one of the signs of a really great writer... they don’t just create a movie star role or two and some set pieces... they create a world, and they invest each and every one of their characters with the same care.

Gillespie, though, worked with this cast, and he’s managed to get amazing work out of Paul Schneider, Kelli Garner, Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson, and, above all, Ryan Gosling. These are all talented actors who have done good work before, some of them even having worked together before, but how many times have you seen a really good cast stranded? Gillespie has a deft touch with them, though, and he accomplishes something no other film so far has in my opinion: he makes Gosling truly loveable. He’s an accomplished performer. He’s a technical marvel as an actor, and if you really respect the craft, there’s no way you can dismiss the body of work that Gosling’s been building. He’s been smart about his more overtly commercial work, and THE NOTEBOOK in particular put him in a position to carry a movie, allowing him to be careful about the films he chose to do. But he’s a hard guy to warm up to on film. There’s a prickly intelligence to his best work that I don’t find very approachable, but that seems to be endemic to a lot of the good young actors in Gosling’s age range. For some reason, Gillespie captures a different Gosling here, and there’s some sort of alchemy that happens with the rest of the cast, and you believe in them as family. You believe in the connections between them. In a film like this, that’s the difference between decent and great. You can fake the connections and still come up with a decent film, but when everything works and those connections feel absolutely real, that’s when you end up with a special film.

All of this is preamble, of course, to the elephant in the room: how the fuck do you make a movie about a guy who is having a relationship with a Real Doll and not make it creepy?

Because if you’ll remember, when I was posting a trailer for this movie, I also included an imbedded YouTube video of an English documentary about guys who are in “relationships” with Real Dolls. And it was one of the most grotesque and unnerving things I’ve seen in recent memory. It really freaked me out, and it made me skeptical about this one’s underlying premise.

The simple answer is you sidestep the issue of sex altogether. That’s not what LARS & THE REAL GIRL is about. In fact, I suspect Lars is a virgin. Sex isn’t even part of the equation, and he deflects it in several interesting ways when he first imagines Bianca. That’s the name he gives to the Real Doll he orders. When he introduces her to Gus (Schneider) and Karin (Mortimer), his brother and his sister-in-law respectively, he makes sure to tell them that Biana is very religious, but just to be sure, she’s also in a wheelchair. So Lars removes the issue entirely when he imagines her. The relationship he needs isn’t about that sort of intimacy, and I suspect Lars isn’t really equipped to think about anyone in sexual terms. He doesn’t buy Bianca for a sexual outlet; he brings her “to visit” so that he can finally learn how to socialize. He wants to reach out to the community around him. He wants to be part of his family. He wants all those things, but he’s not equipped for them, and so Bianca becomes a tool for him to practice so that he can make mistakes without hurting anyone, without being hurt himself. Lars is a sweet and damaged character, and I can see how easily Oliver’s script or Gosling’s performance could have made him seem like a simpleton or a creep or anti-social or insane... but it never happens. Lars just seems to be trapped, like a kid who climbed a high dive, then looked down and realized where he was. He wants to dive, but he’s afraid of what’s going to happen when he hits the water.

So much of a film like this depends on the casting of the love interest, the person we’re rooting for Lars to end up with, and Kelli Garner might be the person who benefits the most from this film in the long run. She makes a credible romantic possibility as Margo, and she manages to make us think that she could hook up with Lars, that she’s the right choice for him. It’s nice to actually root for people in a film like this because they’re decent and sweet and deserve good things, and not because some convoluted bullshit plot tells us to root for lying narcissistic assholes, like most “romantic comedies.”

Think of how powerfully abused that term is when talking about films. “Romantic comedy.” How often is that description used for a film that is neither romantic nor funny. Doesn’t that seem wrong? Doesn’t it seem to devalue a genre when 90% of that genre fails to fit the basic definition? LARS AND THE REAL GIRL is a potent reminder of just what is truly romantic in movies... it’s the ability to make us believe not only that two particular characters are right for each other, but that it is possible for anyone to ever really be right for anyone else. Fate... destiny... love at first sight... all these things are ideas sold to us by romantic fiction, and at its worst, these things can be cloying, insulting, even offensive. But when everything gels just so, as it does in LARS AND THE REAL GIRL, it reminds us of just how a cliché became a cliché in the first place.

This is first rate work that reminds me of a film like LOCAL HERO or even the work of Preston Sturges. Yeah, that’s right... I said Preston Sturges. He wrote screwball communities better than anyone, and this film’s got a doozy of a small town. I wish I’d spent my whole life in one place, and I wish I felt like I had a hometown I could claim as my own. I am sure I could get in touch with many people from my past, but they’re all over the place. I’ve always imagined that the real benefit to growing up in a small town where everyone knows everyone else is that after a while, you don’t have to worry about secrets because everyone knows everything, and everyone practices true tolerance. I know it wouldn’t really be like that, but that’s the fantasy, and this film fully indulges that. I like what it has to say about community, and I wish that’s how it really works. Maybe that’s another part of the romance, that small-town life that doesn’t exist but should. I’m not sure there’s any community that would indulge Lars to the degree that this one does, but it raises the question of why that seems so unlikely. Are we that threatened by each other’s eccentricities? Or is there room for us to allow people their quirks in pursuit of our own? As much as I think there are some big ideas percolating in LARS AND THE REAL GIRL, its main strength is as simple confident entertainment. Like I said at the start of this piece, I didn’t see MR. WOODCOCK, but based on this movie, I’d say Craig Gillespie is a comedy director of real substance.

This is one of the best films I’ve seen so far this year, and I’ve managed to see something like 140 new releases so far. Unassuming and delightful from end to end, LARS AND THE REAL GIRL is exactly the kind of film people always say they want to see more of. Now let’s see if audiences actually support it now that it’s out there.

I hope to have more reviews for you later today, including my take on 30 DAYS OF NIGHT, but I’ve got a full schedule to keep. As that potential writer’s strike gets closer, I find myself getting busier and busier each day...

Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles