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.