It’s a doll house – a DOLL HOUSE!

Shy, reclusive Lars one day buys a Real Doll named Bianca, lavishes all the emotions of a real relationship on her – love, jealousy, impatience, happiness – and doesn’t have sex with her. In other words, he’s having a real relationship.

Written by Nancy Oliver (SIX FEET UNDER), directed by Craig Gillespie (MR WOODCOCK), LARS AND THE REAL GIRL is an intriguing thought experiment, about Lars (Ryan Gosling), a disturbed young man who brings a Real Doll (yes, the sex objects made to resemble life size hot women) into his small town community as his girlfriend. The local psychologist Dagmar (Patricia Clarkson) advises the town to go along with the delusion because it is fulfilling something that Lars needs to “cure” him of whatever is ailing him. One helluva sympathetic town…

Lars lives in the guest house of his brother Gus (Paul Schneider, looking like Zachary Quinto) and wife Karin (Emily Mortimer). They’re both concerned about Lars, but while Karin maturely tries to accept Bianca, Gus’s flabbergasted reactions about his brother’s psychosis are priceless, and they sell the film, because though the town of Boundless Sympathy USA accepts the delusion readily, we needed someone on our side to say, “WTF?!”

Ryan Gosling goes out on a limb to portray a timid, introverted, discomfited lost soul in Lars, combing down his hair like a nerd stereotype and willfully being soft-spoken and slightly eerie.

On the pretense of examining Bianca every week, Dagmar slowly teases out Lars’s deep fears and loneliness, and why Bianca is in his life. At their first meeting, we hear the message, “She’s here for a reason.” And later, Lars would tell Gus, “She likes to help people.” Of course, she’s inadvertently helping him become a part of the community that he shunned for so long, allowing him to appear at parties with her as his date, attend church and mingle with the people afterwards, and be accepted unto their bosom as an integral cog instead of an outsider.

But the plan backfires. The townspeople are so accommodating and take Bianca’s sovereignty so far that they make a life for her separate from Lars: before we know it, Bianca is volunteering at the library, she’s doing benefits, she’s being picked up from home to attend events without Lars, and she eventually gets elected to the school board! Lars fumes, like any man would, who is not seeing enough of his hot Danish woman – and Karin overhears him having a nasty “couple-fight” with Bianca from another room. It’s dangerously hilarious.

I actually thought the movie might go in another direction: Lars lets Bianca sleep in Gus’s main house, while he still sleeps in the guest house, so I thought Gus would one day get busted with Bianca and that would open a whole new can of beans with the wife, Lars and the psychologist… I guess I’m the only one with the dirty mind ’round here…

Kelli Garner is Margo, who works with Lars, and openly crushes on him, disappointed when Bianca makes the scene, but sticking by Lars as a “friend.” We all know why she hangs around: these women with only One Thing on their minds! Margo takes Lars bowling one night while Bianca is out with the townswomen; she puts the hard word on him; he declines, “I don’t wanna cheat on Bianca.” Margo denies thinking in that direction – but now she knows what we men feel like after a date that goes nowhere: WASTE OF TIME! Thinking you are cultivating and then being turned down flat. The first thing that goes through our heads is, “Where’s the nearest whorehouse?!”

Bianca eventually gets sick and dies! In Lars’s mind, of course. It reminds us of that SOUTH PARK episode where Cartman kills off his toys when he doesn’t need them psychologically any more. Dagmar tells Gus, “I’m not making this happen – Lars is. He found her unconscious, he’s the one who says she’s dying!”

They must have some dandy health insurance to have an ambulance pick up Bianca and put her in a hospital bed! If we look at it from the point of view of the hospital staff being in on the gag to help their mental patient Lars, then we can accept it. But our suspension of disbelief dies about the same time Bianca does.

Even though it is funny – because through the pain, Lars’s delusion is being cured – there is a terrifying underlying sickness in Lars’s decision to kill off Bianca. Let’s go from Real Doll to real world: Margo never lets up in her low-self-esteem crush on Lars, even when he’s going through his delusion. Right at the end, her asks her, “Wanna take a walk?” She says yes breathlessly. Meant to leave the viewer with hope for Lars. But let’s examine: what does Margo expect in her future with this guy who openly brought a Real Doll into the community as his girlfriend? That means there’s something substantially wrong with the wiring upstairs. Just because he makes his delusional girlfriend die doesn’t mean he is cured of that particular obsession; it doesn’t mean he’s “cured” of being a wacko per se. The fact that he had to make her die in order to pursue a “normal” relationship is not normal to begin with – and says something ultra creepy about him: that he is so fanatical about relationships and fidelity that he needs his partner to die before embarking on another relationship. He actually asked Bianca to marry him – and “she said no.” Then she started “dying.” What happens when he bores of the real life Margo, or asks her to marry him too soon and she declines? Does he tie her up in a basement and pretend she’s dying of starvation – while letting her die of starvation?

In the end, Lars got it all wrong: he pathologically created that Real Doll’s persona for a relationship where he could go through every facet of psychological trauma and not have sex. But that’s what Real Girls are for.

END

The movie about the book about the murders.

CAPOTE, first of all, is not a biopic. It covers a short period in writer Truman Capote’s life when he immersed himself in his classic True Crime novel In Cold Blood, the first “non-fiction novel” of its kind. Published in 1965, this revolutionary book would make Capote the most famous writer in America. And it would suck his soul bone dry, as he never completed another novel before his death in 1984.

Directed by Bennett Miller, CAPOTE follows Truman Capote (a trimmer Philip Seymour Hoffman, putting on that outrageous accent and playing fruitier than even his drag queen in FLAWLESS) as he interviews the two killers of the Clutter family in Holcomb Texas in 1959, Richard Hickok (Mark Pellegrino) and Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.). He lightbulbed on the idea of a book which would reveal their psyches, as well as the reactions of the townsfolk and the detectives who eventually caught the two killers, led by Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper), but didn’t bargain on the research being a heart-sickening exercise that would take nearly six years of his life, test his skill as an author and his very humanity.

This movie is not taken from Capote’s book In Cold Blood, but rather from a section of the book by Gerald Clarke, Capote: A Biography, written for the screen by Dan Futterman.

Viewing CAPOTE or reading In Cold Blood reminds us of that scientific precept that states you cannot observe a system without becoming a PART OF that system and thereby affecting the outcome of your observations. (Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.)

Upon inserting himself into the story, by becoming so close to the killers that he actually hired powerful lawyers to appeal their cases to the Supreme Court, Capote affected the outcome of his novel; a tale that would keep stretching into the future with no end in sight, because he envisioned the hanging of the killers as closure.

Capote (author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1958) was completely stymied on how to psychologically deal with this new form of fiction he was pioneering; he found himself split into two mental halves – one half empathizing somberly with the quadruple-murderers, while the mercenary side of him surreptitiously picked their brains for book material. Though he admitted a kinship with Perry Smith (“It was like we were raised in the same house, and one day he got up and walked out the back door, and I walked out the front”) he would continually lie to him about the book’s details.

After four years of stays of execution, it was Capote who was having nervous breakdowns because the killers were not being executed. Ergo, his book was in limbo, remaining unfinished. When Perry pleads with him to acquire another lawyer, Capote writes back tersely that he cannot find one. It’s a morbid conundrum, as Capote finally wants them dead and so must remove himself from the equation.

Catherine Keener plays Capote’s childhood friend and confidante, Nelle Harper Lee, whose own book, To Kill a Mockingbird, is published during this period. Only she can tell him truths about himself with impunity.

One of the best features of this movie is that, while Capote was openly gay, he is never turned into a punchline – not by the high society depicted in the movie or by the makers of the movie. He lived with his lover (Bruce Greenwood) with no ostracism from the entertainment world. Though he was renowned as the life of any party, we only see snippets of his gregarious night life in CAPOTE.

Movie is slow-moving but not boring, rather, introspective and disturbing. When Perry is eventually hanged, Capote’s tears are not so much for the loss of the man whom he had grown close to, but for the fact that Capote himself could have stayed that man’s execution indefinitely if he had chosen to invest in more lawyers; his tears are rage against his own selfish agenda in wanting to complete his book.

Capote expressed no joy at the publication of In Cold Blood, feeling like his soul was sold for its research.

We feel just as soul-spent by the end of this dark, somber film.

END

Remember when you violently helped those hobbits at this place?

When the Evil Twin Piques.

Director David Cronenberg assails his audience with A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, surface “pulp thriller,” with an undercurrent of vigilantism, Darwinism and Plot Conveniences. A simplistic tale which careens against the cerebral precepts of Survival of the Fittest, Natural Selection and Freudian sublimation. (Any more big words, or are we done for the day?…)

Schizopoffy

Loosely screenplayed by Josh Olson, from the graphic novel of the same name (by John Wagner and Vince Locke), A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE is a psychological thriller centering around leisurely Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen), living the Life Idyllic in a town which elevates podunk to an art form. Running the town diner with the urgency of a napping camel, Tom is well-liked by his bumpkin employees and patrons, and long-married to wife Edie (steaming Maria Bello, so readily-sexed that every man in the audience immediately pegged her as a work of fiction – but we can dream, can’t we?).

During expository scenes establishing Tom’s still-lusty relationship with his spouse of 17 years, and his teen son’s status as the school’s bully-fodder (both sub-plots artfully invoking the word “pussy”), Cronenberg tweaks the Norman Rockwell ’til the syrup bleeds from the celluloid, setting up his audience in eerily-expectant treacle, to ensure that the subsequent dose of savagery will scythe like razor-wire…

Into Tom’s diner walks the criminal element from the disturbing opening sequence of the film – in a parallel universe, these two guys would be Lance Henriksen and Matthew McConaughey – who attempt to divest Tom of his languidly-earned cash at gunpoint. Big mistake! With the suaveness of a panther, Tom efficiently dispatches the two felons, illustrating he is somewhat less somnolent than his aw-shucks drawl implies.

Like George Lucas ignoring his actors for fear of clutter on his green-screen, at this point in the film, Cronenberg and his writers opt to ignore realities which would clutter his movie’s thematic sweeps, to wit, The Media and The Law. The Media, which is instrumental in alerting Tom’s presence to characters from his unsavory past, suddenly vanishes altogether once it serves its purpose of conjuring those characters into the storyline; indeed, the absence of an intrusive, ubiquitous press – which, in our reality, would descend rapaciously on a multiple murder story before the last body’s chalk outline is drawn – leaves us stranded in an insular universe of the film-maker’s creation, and we shift uneasily in our seats at this lack of plausibility.

Remember that violent family portrait?

Like an Armani-suited vulture, out of Tom’s past swoops the sinister Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris), all one-eyed and unnerving, and calling Tom “Joey from Philly” with the insistence of a jabbing finger to the chest, presaging Tom’s descent into his dark half.

Though the trailers tout this “mystery” aspect, we are ahead of the characters in identifying that Tom is indeed a re-wrought persona of professional killer “Joey,” and the movie is more a study in Tom reconciling his adopted pacifism with his innate violent streak. After sublimating it for almost two decades, it is his dormant Art of Killing which saves Tom’s life. Guess it’s like riding a bike.

After loosing his inner beast so publicly, Tom finds that his whipping-boy son has opened a can of whup-ass on his own bullies. Whether he does this due to his father’s latent “violent genes” or because his father set a decisive example, we are not to know (Nature vs. Nurture?), as a father-son confrontation leads only to a smack upside the head from Tom. When the son goes Outlaw Josey Wales in a later scene, the question looms larger, but it is not Cronenberg’s purview to answer his thematic questions, only to pose them. Matter of fact, he avoids wrestling his themes to the ground like the Stall family avoids open discussion on Tom’s sordid past, leaving us, once again, shifting uneasily.

In his outré universe (NAKED LUNCH, CRASH, EXISTENZ), Cronenberg is king – some may contend dauphin, to David Lynch – of suspenseful, disturbing vignettes, left-field sex, and unapologetic brutality that allows him loving close-ups of decimated faces and mutilated nose cavities; of these aspects, there are plenty in HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, as well as Tom’s underlying themes of alienation and betrayal (with his wife), hero-worship and anger (from his son) and self-doubt and intrinsic dependence (on his bad self – not SHAFT bad, but actually bad). Yet we cannot reconcile or forgive the haphazard conclusion tacked onto this otherwise engaging drama, starting its fall from grace at the point where the seemingly one-man Sheriff’s Department, Sam (Peter MacNeill, recently Detective Horvath of Showtime’s QUEER AS FOLK), exhibits embarrassment in questioning Tom – who was only at the quintuple-murder stage at that point! – which serves to highlight the absence of high-level judicial inquiries regarding Tom’s hurricane of violence; the Cronenberg “Ignoring Quotient” in overdrive.

By the time Tom faces his brother, Richie Cusack (a dangerously-smarmy William Hurt, doing his best Gary Oldman), the film degenerates into an Adam West BATMAN episode, in which the Villain, who has every opportunity to eradicate the Hero expeditiously, instead plots a prolonged and gruesome death for him, with a lot of Villain-talk – if only the darned Hero would cooperate and stop that infernal escaping! The last scenes seem to be a visceral payoff for the bloodthirsty contingent, and leave us with unanswered – and maybe unanswerable – questions regarding the future of Tom’s estranged family dynamic.

A history of violence? Isn’t this Viggo fella the same guy who spent the last four years raging postal at Helm’s Deep and Pelennor Fields, slaughtering thousands of face-challenged evil-kins alongside a dandy archer and fey wizard? You can run, but you can’t hide, Aragorn, Son of Arathorn!…

END