Blow-Up
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Blow-Up An uncharming tale of a troubled young man and his infl atable doll. BY JOHN PODHORETZ In the comic classic Harvey (1950), James Stewart played a drunken fellow who claims his best...
...If anyone tells Lars that Bianca is made of plastic, he simply doesn’t hear the remark...
...Gus and Karin, who is pregnant, take Lars to the local doctor, who also has a degree in psychology...
...Gosling is acting here...
...Lars and the Real Girl is so defi antly peculiar that it has managed to cloud the minds of several otherwise sensible movie critics, who are following Lars’s delusional example in praising the fi lm that contains him...
...Gosling’s actorly touches, his silent moves, add at least fi ve minutes to the movie’s running time...
...John Podhoretz is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...
...Lars asks his brother Gus and sister-in-law Karin to put Bianca up...
...What were they drinking/smoking...
...He stammers, bumbles, pulls on his hair, clears his throat, wanders around in a little circle—every time he has a line of dialogue to speak...
...Some are even offering comparisons to Little Miss Sunshine, last year’s wonderful and bracing comedy about American losers...
...What it doesn’t have in common with Little Miss Sunshine is that it is awful in very nearly every respect— so awful in its alternately disturbing and mundane way, in fact, that it does not even succeed in achieving the camp effect of being unintentionally funny...
...This isn’t just a bad performance...
...The movie is called Lars and the Real Girl...
...Still, what we are watching is a man carrying around an anatomically correct sex doll with whom he sometimes has screaming fi ghts in a car in the middle of a forest—even as he is living on the same property with a pregnant woman about to give birth...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ In the comic classic Harvey (1950), James Stewart played a drunken fellow who claims his best friend is a six-foot-tall invisible rabbit, and is indulged in his fantasy by his frustrated sister...
...Eventually, everybody in town—an uncommonly glum and grim sort of place that could use a dash of fantasy— goes along with it, too...
...It’s about a sweet, vacant, and withdrawn 27-year-old who begins squiring a very expensive and realisticlooking sex doll around the small town where he’s lived all his life...
...Some fi rm has chosen to distribute it...
...And it has Ryan Gosling, who showed in The Notebook that he has the chops to be an old-fashioned romantic leading man of the sort Hollywood hasn’t seen since the 1970s...
...In 2007, Ryan Gosling chose to follow up his Best Actor Oscar nomination last year—he was the youngest nominee in the category in the award’s 80-year history— with the lead role in a movie that combines all the hilarity of River’s Edge and all the horror of Harvey...
...Someone directed it...
...At least that would offer a rational explanation for the existence of this positively gobstopping piece of work...
...The doctor talks to Lars and then informs his family that Lars is suffering from a “delusion”—a diagnosis that evidently required an advanced degree...
...Gosling is so actorish that, in playing a shy and awkward man, he’s furiously, aggressively shy and awkward— which is, of course, exactly the opposite of what a shy and awkward person is really like...
...Presumably, these people would say that Lars and the Real Girl is a movie about love—about how Lars’s aching need to love inspires an entire town to an act of self-sacrifi cing love for one of its own...
...What were they thinking...
...The doctor tells Lars’s brother that he’s not schizophrenic or psychopathic...
...And yet not a single thing he does is remotely believable or true...
...In 1986’s terrifying River’s Edge, Dennis Hopper played a psychotic drug dealer living in a trailer with a blow-up sex doll who helps a group of teenage kids cover up the drugrelated death of a friend...
...He says the doll is his girlfriend, that her name is Bianca, that she is the very religious Brazilian daughter of missionary parents, and that, because of her religious convictions, he and his new girlfriend cannot share quarters...
...He delivers what may be the most mannered performance in the history of fi lm...
...oh lord, is he acting...
...It would be a relief to know that Lars and the Real Girl was actually made because someone was using the production to run a drug-smuggling operation...
...And said doctor, displaying what screenwriter Nancy Oliver and director Craig Gillespie clearly believe is great wisdom, tells Lars’s family to go along with it until there’s a way of determining the cause of Lars’s delusion...
...Someone named Sidney Kimmel—a clothing manufacturer who has decided to become a motion-picture producer— put up the money to make it...
...Perhaps that is why Lars and the Real Girl exists: to function as a model, to be used in drama schools, of what not to do as an actor and, in fi lm schools, of how not to make a heartwarming indie...
...Humoring such a person rather than providing him with real help would not be an act of love but an act of madness in itself that could put a vulnerable woman and an innocent infant in severe jeopardy...
...Gosling, however, does achieve a landmark of sorts...
...but from what we see, that is exactly what he is...
...Someone wrote Lars and the Real Girl...
...What it has in common with Little Miss Sunshine is that it is a small-budget independent fi lm that was shown at a few fancy fi lm festivals...
...it is the independent-fi lm version of Laurence Olivier’s turn as an Orthodox cantor in Neil Diamond’s 1979 version of The Jazz Singer—a car wreck for the ages...
Vol. 13 • October 2007 • No. 7
