Lars and the Real Girl

"The search for real love begins outside the box."

Sweet. It was the word that immediately popped into my head as the end credits started to roll. Not the colloquial "sweet" used by adolescent boys, but the pleasing, satisfying, endearing and thoughtful sort of sweet you might find in a dictionary. Without all the sugar allusions. Because while it was a sweet film, it wasn't nauseatingly so; it had the perfect balance of reality and bittersweetness to even things out. It was moving. I laughed out loud.

Ryan Gosling deserves another Oscar nomination, if only for the way he blinked. Some actors dye their hair for a movie; Gosling transformed every little mannerism. The blinking, the squinting, the posture. There was something so unselfconscious about the performance, something so honest and awkward and gentle. The entire audience fell for the man-child named Lars.

And not since Wilson the volleyball has there been such a beautiful on-screen relationship with an inanimate object.

Go see it.