An overly distilled slug-line — guy orders plastic woman over the
Internet, and introduces her to his family as his new girlfriend —
could easily have made for a one-note comedy of limited inspiration.
But fast rising star Ryan Gosling’s participation in Lars and the Real Girl immediately demands that it be taken a little more seriously. There’s
also the title’s implied tug between the sardonic and the sincere, one
that director Craig Gillespie uses as a springboard for a film that’s
at once funny and surprisingly poignant. “When I first heard about this
project, I thought it was wacky,” admits Gosling during a recent
interview.
“But there is a whole community of guys out there that have these dolls
and have very complicated relationships with them. For me, it was not
dissimilar from a kid’s relationship with his teddy bear; you love it
and you go through really important parts of your life with it, you
talk to it, and if you were ever to lose it, it would be heartbreaking.”

In an interesting, subdued way, Lars and the Real Girl is
actually a parable about emotionally ambivalent individuals; more
specifically, a generation plus of prosperous, peacetime beta males
thrown into turbulent, uncertain times and struggling to make choices
period, let alone make peace with those decisions. “He could have been
a part of my family or something, I felt like I knew him,” says Gosling
of his character. “It was a really great experience for me because a
lot of the other things I’ve done, I’ve been investigating the
self-destructive part of my nature.” Lars, though “is kind of like a Don Quixote-esque character,” Gosling
continues. “He is the power of belief, and whatever he believes is
true. When Quixote goes into the courtyard of the castle and he’s
talking to the prostitutes, he thinks they are royalty. And for that
moment that he thinks they are royalty, they think they are too. They
play along, and for that moment it becomes true.”

While he’s played characters both more intense and seemingly rooted in
personal experience, Gosling says that Lars, of all the roles he’s
played, has most stuck with him. “I feel like what I learned from Lars is that you can never go far enough,” he explains. “What Lars and the
movie did break down in a way for me was the
difference between who we are, who we think we are, and who we think
people think we are — how you kind of turn into five different people,
[with] one person trying to navigate all of those different agendas. For me, it was such fertile creative ground that the ideas
for him were endless. I could do a scene a million times for him and do it differently
every time, because he exists in such a positive place that so much can grow
there.”

Hey, who says there isn’t artificial life? It sounds like Lars could give The Graduate‘s Benjamin Braddock some succinct advice: “Plastics.” For the full feature interview, from FilmStew, click here.