October
2
Lars and the Real Girl: Gosling and Gillespie
Lars and the Real Girl is one of those movies that walks a tightrope between laughs and genuine emotion. Think Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude or Being There, two movies that Ryan Gosling brought up at our Variety screening series Q & A the other night. In this case, rookie commercial director Craig Gillespie and Gosling saw the value in Six Feet Under scribe Nancy Oliver's original script about a closed-down young guy who falls in love with a mailorder full-size plastic doll. After they got nowhere with the studios, finally Bill Horberg at Sidney Kimmel Entertainment pulled the green-light switch. This could be a sleeper hit for SKE (and distributor MGM).
The film's casting is impeccable: Emily Mortimer and Paul Schneider (who also shines in The Assassination of Jesse James) are standouts. But the movie belongs to Gosling, who is doing remarkably mature work for a guy who is just 26. Next he's going to play the father of a 12-year-old in Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones--hence the aging beard.
Lars and the Real Girl is funny throughout, utterly inoffensive and quite moving. Finally, the film becomes (like It's a Wonderful Life) about the small rural community that supports one of their own. It was shot not far from Gosling's Ontario home; he stayed in his mother's basement during filming.
Here's part of our video conversation. And Variety's review. And Patrick Goldstein's Gillespie column. UPDATE: USA Today's feature on new discovery Bianca.



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