'Lars' tiptoes on tightropes

Craig Gillespie remembers the day a movie producer asked him to consider directing a film called "Lars and the Real Girl," about a man who falls in love with a life-sized sex doll -- an anatomically correct sex doll.

"Why me?" Gillespie asked himself. "I almost said no, but then I had to humor him (the producer). My wife read the script first. One day she asked me if I read it. I said no. She said, 'This is really good. This is what you should be doing.'

"Really? That's the last thing I expected to hear from her. Then I read it and it was an amazing script!"

That script came from Nancy Oliver, writer on the popular comic series "Six Feet Under."

Friday, "Lars and the Real Girl" spread its strange love story to a host of suburban theaters after opening a week earlier at the Century Centre Cinema in Chicago.

In the drama, Ryan Gosling stars as Lars, an emotionally strait-jacketed young man who transfers what little affect he can muster to a sex doll he orders off the Internet.

Casting the part of Bianca the doll became a problem for Gillespie. He couldn't find the right "actress" for the role. He looked at all the sex dolls currently available, and found none that struck his directorial fancy.

"Then I saw a book called 'Still Lovers,' about guys who fall in love with these dolls. There was this one doll that had such a peaceful, soulful quality about it. I asked what doll that was. It was an older model. What worked for me was that her eyelids were partially closed, so she had a peaceful look. Of course, she got a lot of complaints from customers that she looked bored!"

Gillespie had Bianca's retired plastic mold reactivated to cast one more doll. She became Lars' beloved Bianca.

"For Lars, he's in a completely different movie than the other characters in this story," Gillespie said. "Lars is in a love story. For him, this is not a doll, this is a real person. So we went with that idea. What would he be going through in this relationship? Getting to know this person? What do they fight about? His performance came out of that."

And a marvelous performance it is. Gosling, his hair greased down and his gait crippled by poor self-esteem, presents Lars as a frayed electrical wire of lonely desperation. Like the townspeople around Lars, we feel sympathy toward him and want him to find happiness -- even with a switched-off version of Julie Newmar from TV's "My Living Doll."

Gillespie admitted directing "Lars" was a challenge.

"I thought we were really out on a limb in several scenes," he admitted. "We had to believe in the film and rely on Ryan's performance. He did such an amazing job and that's what carries it."

Gillespie looked to other films for inspiration.

"'Being There' works for me in a lot of ways because it's about a guy in this bubble and you hope that it's not going to get burst," he said. "And you hope people are going to go along with it. I was interested in how the filmmakers sustained that, because I thought we had a similar parallel going on.

"Another inspiration was 'Harold and Maude,' Hal Ashby's film about a 15-year-old having a relationship with an 80-year-old woman. That also dealt with a relationship that's completely implausible, and maybe a little hard to swallow for the general public. In all those movies, they were walking on tightropes."