Movie poster for “Lars and The Real Girl”
@JIMHARRISDESIGNS / INSTAGRAM
María Castaño, Arts & Entertainment Editor
How do you handle grief? Do you hide? Do you take it on and decide to make the best of it, or do you cry and beg for someone to come tell you what to do? Grief to me is really confusing.
There is a very specific socially accepted way of dealing with it: you cry, you are sad, and then you get over it, but sometimes the tears just won’t come. Or they do want to come, but we don’t have the tools to pull them out, to express what we feel and come out having learned something from exteriorizing something so intimate. Writing down and talking about your feelings with others is a powerful tool for processing what happens to us.
So now my question is, how do you handle grief when you have no tools? You don’t have anyone to talk to, you can’t reach for pen and paper, and painting was also never your thing. What happens when our only method to process things leaves us behind?
“Lars and the Real Girl” is a fantastic film because it handles its characters with so much kindness and humanity. It gives them a perfectly human nuance, that allows the viewer to feel the warmth of the community as they get together to help Lars get through his relationship with Bianca.
The plot is so silly. It is so easy to make this movie suck by not taking the characters seriously, by laughing at Lars and his social inadequacy, or by densely refusing to understand why they would go along with his theatrics. The tenderness with which the film develops its relationships, and Lars’s unwavering support as he finally processes his fear of abandonment and loss, make it so comforting because it bets on patience and support as the best ways to help someone struggling.
I love how this message of slow growth is represented in Lars’ story, and the moments where he and his brother open up about the guilt Gus felt for leaving Lars behind after their parents died.
I loved his development as he sees how he participated in creating Lars’ fears and social inadequacy, and there’s a lot of guilt, but you can see once he realizes this, there’s a path towards reconciliation that challenges traditional masculinity by allowing some much-needed sentimentality in their relationship. Gus started the movie being this very strong-headed character who had already given up on his brother and ended as a completely different person.
I also loved Lars’ relationship with Margo. She is another amazing character, and that’s another quality that makes this movie shine for me; each female character is their own person. They serve the narrative in a unique way that makes them crucial for the plot and not just decorations or second thoughts.
I liked that the way the movie framed her pivot from Lars to another coworker after Lars showed no interest in her wasn’t vilified, especially because we were seeing it through the lens of Lars himself; it would only make sense for it to be framed as the most natural step for her to take after being rejected by him. As mentioned before, in its tenderness and focus on community, this movie subsequently challenges a lot of our social understandings of gender performance, thus giving Margo the grace to flirt with someone else and cry over something childish without caricaturizing her. She is still as human as everyone else in the film and allowed to show another part of herself during the bowling alley scene.
This film gives all of its characters the room to grow organically within a context that is incredibly easy to make fun of, showing the lengths to which a bit of kindness and understanding can lead people.
Lars’ traumas lead him down a path of isolation and a paralyzing fear of losing anybody else, and it is in a fake doll that he can find the perfect subject to examine his fear of losing people and of people leaving him.
To have the film end with Bianca dying after she became so integrated into the community is a testament to Lars’ development, as he slowly realizes he does not need her anymore.
All of the care the community poured into making Bianca a living, breathing person and Lars’ final argument with Karin, alongside his reconciliation with his brother, made him realize the isolation he had been experiencing was caused mainly by his fears of people leaving him, so having him mourn and lose Bianca at his own pace in such a supportive environment helped him process all of his feelings and come out of himself in the healthiest way possible.
I loved that even after he goes through this whole process, he is still as awkward as in the beginning, showing that his personality was not the problem, as he is shown to have friends and multiple people who want to get closer to him; the problem always was his own reticence to letting people in.
This movie is so beautiful and so well written because it is so hopefully human. Showing the best sides of community and how growth can happen from the most unexpected places if we just give it time.