Philadelphia Weekly

True Pitt: Brad gives one of the best performances of his career in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

New Releases

Lars and the Real Girl
Directed by Craig Gillespie
A-
Reviewed by Doug Wallen
Opens Fri., Oct. 19

Let's get the premise out of the way: Lars loves a doll. Not a blow-up doll, but one of those anatomically correct mannequin sex dolls. Her name's Bianca. Granted, this could make for a disturbing arthouse drama, but Lars and the Real Girl moves like a comedy, wringing unlikely and uncomfortable laughs from a quiet study of loneliness.

Of course the movie hinges on believing in Lars. Luckily he's played by Ryan Gosling, the best and most convincing young actor in recent memory. Famed for making the most of meaty roles--behold the neo-Nazi Jew in The Believer or his Oscar-nominated turn in Half Nelson--Gosling carries this story, appearing in nearly every frame and never once releasing his tractor-beam grip on the audience. (I'd honestly pay to see a movie where he just reads the newspaper on the toilet for 90 minutes.)

We first see Lars sad-eyed and shoulders stooped, a church-going office drone who wraps himself in extra layers of winter clothes because he doesn't like to be touched. He lives in the garage of the house he grew up in, now inhabited by his older brother (All the Real Girls' Paul Schneider) and pregnant sister-in-law (Emily Mortimer), who worries he spends too much time alone. She and everyone else around Lars gently try to match him up with someone or just bring him out of his shell.

All that changes when, one day, a human-sized box arrives in the mail. Lars is suddenly aglow and has a skip in his step, though still with an awkward mustache and a nervous habit of blinking repeatedly. From there it's an inevitable question of whether he's crazy, and whether the people in his life--including his doctor (Patricia Clarkson) and doe-eyed co-worker (Kelli Garner)--will accept his delusion or try to break the spell.

Screenwriter Nancy Oliver, a former writer on Six Feet Under, spins a wistfully funny parable around the familiar structure of an American indie film. Directed by Craig Gillespie--who gave us Mr. Woodcock, of all things--Lars and the Real Girl is cute, subtle and unexpectedly moving, due in no small part to the eerie depth of Gosling's performance.

Glengarry Glen Ross meets American Idol in director Craig Zobel's trenchant, curiously affecting debut feature chronicling the squalid saga of two sad-sack song-sharks and their misadventures in the American Southwest.

Working for the slimy fly-by-night office park record label from which this picture takes its title, failed disc jockey Martin (Pat Healy) and boisterous huckster Clarence (Kene Holliday) travel around the countryside setting up some seriously awkward and shoddy motel room auditions, promising to produce demo discs for aspiring young singers who hope to become the next big thing, while simultaneously gouging them of their life savings on overhead "studio fees." It's a scam nearly as old as the music business itself, but what's fresh here is Zobel's surprising sympathy for these devils.

The twist is that Martin and Clarence are just as broke and almost as clueless as their marks, duped into doing the dirty work for those fat-cats in the home office who rake in all the cash. It's a telling modern touch that nowadays even our con men are being conned, and Martin remains so blissfully ignorant he volunteers money out of his own pocket to fund a "new national anthem" that honestly must be heard to be believed. In its own peculiar and unassuming fashion, Great World of Sound is about that nagging, desperate universal need to become a part of something bigger, the desire to believe in dreams even when they're obviously bullshit.

Healy has the tough job of somehow staying sympathetic while preying on poor people--acting more out of desperation and mistaken trust than any outright malice. Holliday has it easier, stealing every scene that isn't nailed down with his back-slapping bravado and natural charm.

Zobel's been catching flak in the press lately, as the film's pricelessly uncomfortable audition scenes were improvised around unsuspecting participants--folks who answered a real-life ad for the fictional Great World of Sound Records, and were thus greeted by Healy and Holliday at the motel room door, riffing in character for the hidden cameras. Some tongue-clucking critics are already shrieking "exploitation" (wonder what they thought of Borat?), but such a charge ignores the kindness with which the director treats these subjects.

To these eyes, the gambit only underlines what makes this such a special little film: Everybody's got a song to sing, and we'll all believe exactly what we want for just as long as we can.

It's official: Ben Affleck isn't embarrassing anymore.

Stepping behind the camera for this taut, engrossing adaptation of Dennis Lehane's Beantown potboiler (the artist formerly known as Bennifer also shares screenwriting credit with Aaron Stockard), Affleck has delivered a surprisingly moody and evocative thriller awash in ethical gray areas and convincing local color. Even better, he's supplied his kid brother Casey with a breakout, bona fide movie star role as slightly built, witheringly sarcastic and strangely soulful private investigator Patrick Kenzie.

Kenzie and his significant other Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan, again relegated to arm candy) are the kind of low-rent gumshoes best employed by collection agents looking for folks who skipped payments on their jet skis. But when a 4-year-old girl is abducted from a neighboring housing project, their associations with Boston's shady underworld provide the kind of leads that cops can't scrape up in such closeted, tribal communities. Kenzie's a modern-day Phillip Marlowe in a dirty tracksuit, armed with street smarts, a foul mouth and one seriously inconvenient moral compass.

Much to the consternation of two police detectives played by Ed Harris and the great 1980s movie staple John Ashton, the younger Affleck cobbles together connections with some stolen drug money and a rotting corpse, and even finds time for a shocking detour through a phantasmagoric haunted house packed with coked-up pedophiles. Meanwhile, the missing child's mother (an amazing Amy Ryan) seems more interested in getting wasted than getting her kid back, and Gone Baby Gone starts piling too many switcheroos and shocking plot twists on top of each another.