A Soft Girl Is Hard to Find

By RICHARD CORLISS

When Lars Lindstrom (Ryan Gosling) introduces his friends to his new girl--a life-size sex doll named Bianca--some folks have trouble accepting it. Brother Gus (Paul Schneider) is concerned that Lars found "a fiance in a box." One guy mutters that Lars is "in love with that slutty hunk of silicone." But most of the other residents of this wintry Midwestern town go with the flow. They've been urging the cripplingly shy Lars to get a girlfriend. And this one is gorgeous enough to be an instant local celebrity; she looks like Angelina Jolie but smaller and less animated. So let Lars be her Brad Pitt or even her Billy Bob Thornton.

Lars and the Real Girl, which begins as a standard indie study of the sympathetic oddball, soon reveals itself as a gentle comedy of community. Prodded by the town doctor (Patricia Clarkson), Gus and his pregnant wife Karin (Emily Mortimer) figure out that for Lars, Bianca is not a sex object but a love object--an outlet for the tenderness he has never been able to express and that his indulgent friends are thrilled to see bloom. Most movies celebrate the journey to another place. Lars pursues the counterargument--that most of us are defined by our past; we are where we've been. Nancy Oliver, the screenwriter, also wrote five episodes of the HBO series Six Feet Under, which found a similarly skewed way to celebrate family and community.

Referencing both James Stewart, as the bumbler who befriends an invisible rabbit in Harvey, and Anthony Perkins, as a dead woman's doting son in Psycho, Gosling tiptoes on the fine line between innocence and madness. Or rather, he stands still at first, rooted in fear, as if his boots had frozen to the snowy ground. Then he finds Bianca and opens up to his not-quite-living doll. Lying contentedly in an old tree house, with Bianca splayed on the ground below, he warbles a wonderfully strangulated version of the Nat King Cole chestnut L-O-V-E. It's one of the most honest expressions of bliss in modern movies.

Craig Gillespie's direction is a little too attentive to the physical drabness of the setting, the slow pulse of north-country life, the locals' constipated cordiality. The story is a Lake Wobegon anecdote that Garrison Keillor would have told in 20 minutes, with a defter comic sense and more laughs. Even the movie's title could use some editing. Why not just Lars' Girl?

But Gosling's charming performance and the film's generosity of spirit fill in the cracks of its longueurs. And you're bound to admire a movie that in this age of snazz and cynicism, has the surpassing nerve to be nice.