Script Review: #96 Lars and the Real Girl (2007) | WGA 101 Greatest Scripts of the 21st Century
A tender and funny love story about a man and his inflatable doll that never gets crass or obscene.
Logline: Extremely shy Lars finds it impossible to make friends or socialize. His brother and sister-in-law worry about him, so when he announces that he has a girlfriend he met on the Internet, they are overjoyed. But Lars’ new lady is a life-size plastic woman. On the advice of a doctor, his family and the rest of the community go along with his delusion.
Written by: Nancy Oliver
Pages: 101
How could Lars and the Real Girl have backfired spectacularly? Let me count the ways: It could have been a crass comedy stuffed with terrible jokes; it could have been a cynical affair loaded with snarky jokes. It is none of these things. Instead, it is a quiet and warm story that is packed with laughs but without a vulgar or mean bone in it.
Lars is a lonely and extremely shy young man who lives alone in the converted garage of his former childhood home. His brother, Gus, and sister-in-law, Karin, are concerned about Lars, who does not like to be touched and hardly has a social life, except for maybe church. His co-worker, Margo, finds him attractive, but he doesn’t pick up on it.
One day, his other co-worker, Kurt, introduces him to ‘Real Girl’, a site selling life-size inflatable dolls that can be “customized” and even has “better than skin” than a human. Lars decides to buy one, calls her Bianca, and introduces her as a handicapped half-Brazilian half-Danish missionary to Gus and Bianca in what might be one of the most awkward dinners of all time.
Although they maintain their composure in front of Lars, Gus freaks out in private and even thinks about having his little brother committed to a hospital (page 20) but Karin shoots it down right away. “If we show how we feel,” Karin tells him, “who knows what could happen.”
It’s one thing for Lars to bring Bianca into Gus and Karin’s life. It’s another for a grown man to introduce an inflatable doll around town without having his delusion rudely destroyed. Karin, more attuned than her husband, decides to set up an appointment with Dr. Dagmar Bergen. Dagmar, who has a psychology background, suggests that Lars’ delusion arose to compensate with losing his psychological balance and will end when he no longer needs Bianca. In the meantime, they have to convince the rest of their community to go along with the delusion.
This is the point where Lars and the Real Girl could have easily derailed, and doesn’t. Instead of turning into a series of episodes where Gus and Karin frantically try to keep people from destroying Lars’ illusion, it mines the premise to demonstrate the goodwill of the town people who go out of their way to integrate Bianca into their lives. To be sure, the suspense is generated by the possibility that someone could tell Lars, even Gus. But the comedy always arises as a result of everyone else’s reactions, and never at Lars’ expense. And it manages to find laughs in the smallest moments. The script keeps the focus on the kindness of people who treat Bianca as seriously as Lars does, whether it’s by taking her to the salon, yoga classes, or even to a town hall meeting, and end up having their own lives changed by her arrival.
It helps that Lars is good-hearted in spite of his shyness. As Karin points out in a rare confrontation, everyone bends over backwards to make Bianca feel welcome because they love Lars (page 63-64). One of the first people to come onboard with supporting Lars is the elderly Mrs. Gruner (page 35-36). The only people who express any unkind sentiments towards Bianca are two co-workers, Jerry and Lisa (page 49-50), but it takes place in one scene without Lars, and is defended by Margo, of all people.
What is the theme of Lars and the Real Girl?
An underlying theme in Lars and the Real Girl is how we anthropomorphize inanimate objects as a way to cope with the realities of the outside world. We do this as children with toy vehicles, action figures, dolls, and stuffed animals, involving them in our flights of fantasy when we play. But it usually remains within the confines of our bedroom or the house. The situation in Lars is no different, except that an entire town decides to join in the game. Most people never entirely grow out of this, though: Kurt still keeps action figures in his cubicle, Margo has a teddy bear. To them, they are as real as Bianca is to Lars- this is demonstrated in the scene where Margo is upset that Kurt hung a noose around her teddy bear’s neck (page 73).
Look around you, and you will find that many adults across generations have yet to put away their childish things. When plenty of grown-ups still line up the block to watch the latest Batman movie, how can we fault Lars for wanting to believe the doll he has is real?
Lars’ anxiety also stems from Karin’s pregnancy. His own mother died in childbirth, leaving his broken-hearted father to raise him. Gus had fled home, but he still feels guilty about abandoning his brother. Dagmar, who is kind and astute, perceives that Bianca’s arrival could be a means for Lars to cope with this loss, a reenactment of the trauma except now he has more control over the situation to make it through to the end (page 86).
In some ways, it is an inverse of the Pygmalion myth- only, instead of Galatea coming to life, Bianca dies (page 97). There’s a touching scene where the elderly ladies in the community sit with Lars and keep wake while Bianca is “dying” (page 91-92), helping Lars to understand that life and death are part of the cycle, never separate.
Who wrote Lars and the Real Girl screenplay?
Lars and the Real Girl was written by Nancy Oliver (born Feb 8, 1955), who came largely from a theater background before finding work on the award-winning HBO series, Six Feet Under (she and Alan Ball, the show’s creator, Alan Ball, founded the General Nonsense Theater Company decades before this). The script was her first feature screenplay and it ranked No. 3 on the 2005 edition of The Black List (a compilation of the most liked, unproduced screenplays in Hollywood). Oliver received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the 80th Academy Awards in 2008 but lost to Juno (which also appears on the WGA’s 101 Greatest Screenplays of the 21st Century— come to think of it, four out of the five scripts nominated for Best Original Screenplay in 2008 appear on it!). To date, it is the only feature screenplay she has written that has been made. That’s a shame because this is a wonderful story and I would love to read more of her work.
By toeing the line between sincerity and absurdity, Oliver brings a touch of Charlie Kauffman into its absurd premise to find its humanity. In the end, I came to believe in Bianca in the same way that the town came to believe in her, and I was glad to have known her even if it was for a brief 102 pages.
(Note: the script fails the Bechdel test- even the longest scene between two female characters, Margo and Karin, end up being about Lars, but then again, it is his story).