Review: Lars and the Real Girl

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I’m of two minds about “Lars and the Real Girl,” a well-manufactured bit of whimsy with a premise that sounds both a turn-off and becomes more than a little creepy when you think about it for half a second: Ryan Gosling plays a simple guy whose would-be Capraesque small-town burghers approve and encourage him when he falls for a mail-order sex doll (in PG-13 fashion). Director Craig Gillespie is a clever guy on the basis of his work here, but I’m almost reminded of “Zoo,” the hauntingly beautiful movie from earlier this year that took as its subject a collection of men who went into the Washington State wilderness to have sex with horses. When a director like Robinson Devor, working with a writer like Charles Mudede and a cinematographer like Sean Kirby, can make a movie as singular as “Police Beat” (2002), you want to see those talents applied to something that isn’t offensive for offense’s sake or quirky for quirkiness’ sake. I’ve got the same feeling here: Gosling and Gillespie have it in them to do sparkling work, but the very premise is a turn-off, and the movie doesn’t rise above it, even though a calliope of laughter played throughout the weekend showing I caught it at. Gosling’s intelligence belies his attempt to play the fool, but I guess my squeamishness was summed up best in an essay by the L.A. Times’ Carina Chocano: “‘Lars and the Real Girl”‘ may be a self-consciously cute, low-budget art-house comedy, but its central conceit is a perfect metaphor for what’s happened to male and female characters in mainstream comedies… He’s human, she’s a piece of plastic with a fantasy projected on it.” With Emily Mortimer, Paul Schneider. The script is by “Six Feet Under” scribe Nancy Oliver. 106m. (Ray Pride) LANDMARK CENTURY