Manohla Dargis of the New York Times thought that this film was a bit hokey because it takes the issue of mental health and makes something Capra-esque out of it. Lars was abandoned and abused when he was young and finds it difficult to connect with other human beings, to the extent that he ends up buying an anatomically correct blow-up doll named Bianca and then pretending that she is a real woman, with a real life, real history, and real love for Lars. The rest of the community, led by the town shrink, goes along with this play-acting, and soon Bianca become an integral part of their community. This is the part that gets Dargis’ goad, and I think I can partly agree with her on this. However, that’s the feel-good part of the movie, the source of the hokum if you will, and I think that’s what the movie is about: without this reaction from the community, the movie just wouldn’t have the same texture, and most likely would end up being something more “serious” or perhaps even bleak. That’s not necessarily a bad thing but I don’t that’s what the filmmakers were going for.

What was interesting to me was the notion that Lars could start fighting with Bianca, make her get ill, and then have her die on him. The message that we’re getting is that mental illness, like other types of illness, can take its course and be done. We all have the ability to self-heal and can return to some semblance of “normalcy” afterwards. By the time you reach the end of the movie, you’ll either be in Lars’ pocket, emotionally, or just find him completely annoying. I thought Gosling’s performance was good, which puts me in the pro-Lars camp. It made me feel good to believe that he could maybe move onto loving a real woman, with all the physical and emotional contact that implies–as terrifying as that is, to Lars. I don’t mind being suckered into liking a character even when your intellectual instincts bid you otherwise, that’s what the movies are about–but still, you wonder whether or not it’s all a bit rosy. Still Gosling is of course the center of this film and his performance, as well as that of as his brother, were excellent. The milieu–some small town in the midwest, in the middle of the winter, really came out as well. The snow, the houses, the churches and community organizations, the beat up cars, the non-descript countryside–again I don’t know if absolute sociological versimilitude was achieved, but I do know that the mood and ambience–a sense of place, and the people that inhabit that place–was achieved, quite nicely I think.