Real Live Talking Walking Living Doll
I didn’t go to the theatre last week, but I saw the best movie of the year so far: Lars and the Real Girl. Yup, I’ve seen No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood. The first is superb for acting, cinematography and suspense, the second for the Biblical nuttiness and brain-busting concentration of Daniel Day-Lewis.
Did I hear “What about Atonement?” at the back of the hall? Get outta here. Apart from that little girl and Vanessa Redgrave in the last reel it stinks. But Lars is a sheer delight and against all the odds, too.
It’s a love story between a young, emotionally cauterised Canadian backwoodsman and his ordered-off-the-Internet inflatable doll. Sounds tacky, huh? It could have been. Believe me, it isn’t.
And in the performances of Ryan Gosling as Lars, Paul Schneider as his brother, Emily Mortimer (yes, John’s daughter; she’s turning out a real peach of an actress) as his sister-in-law and flame-haired Patricia Clarkson as the sympathetic widowed doctor, it has the best acting in an American film since Sideways.
We can never agree about what makes good acting on stage or screen. But the acting in Lars is real, truthful, funny — and in scenes where the other characters respond to the reality Lars invests in his rubber cutie-pie — technically delicious.
The best ensemble acting I have seen in the theatre recently has been in Dealer’s Choice at the Trafalgar, Artefacts at the Bush and The Man Who Had All the Luck at the Donmar. The worst, by a long way, has been in 3 Sisters on Hope Street at Hampstead.
I went to a BAFTA screening of Lars on Piccadilly — the film goes on general release this week — in a state of blissful ignorance about what to expect. Which only redoubled the pleasure of an experience already enhanced by pleasant company and a most agreeable dinner in the clubroom beforehand.
The other great thing about seeing movies at BAFTA is that nobody eats popcorn, nobody chatters through the quiet bits, and nobody moves, let alone leaves, until the last credit has rolled.
And the audience is full of interesting people, some of whom you might know, such as on Friday veteran producer and inveterate theatre first-nighter Richard Jackson (in fact, Richard is at BAFTA every time I go there) and Critics Circle bigwig Peter Cargin. There’s a vague feeling of professional insiderism about the place, without any screeching about, which I like very much.
The two best films I saw last year — The Counterfeiters and The Lives of Others — were chilling political and historical European masterpieces. No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood are instant American classics.
But Lars is something else. A human comedy of a personal and domestic dimension that has endless reverberations for us all and excels in departments of tact, charm, good writing and beautiful direction that I don’t expect to see topped for a long time.
