Craig Gillespie, 2007
A question asked of all Method-ey actors: is chameleon Gosling our young and talented generation’s Brando? Apparently not: Gosling himself salutes Gene Wilder’s genius as his own Brando, and a finer fit it seems too. Gosling is, like Wilder, melancholy with a broken smile; the vinyl crack that makes Tony Bennett’s voice so evocative, here, finding a visual counterpart in Gosling’s world-weary eyes. Unfortunately Gosling seems to have inherited Wilder’s penchant for poor material, and he is often the sole respite in such pants fare as The Notebook, and Remember The fucking Titans. When paired with solid material, however, his ability to authenticate an emotional crumbling is pure craft: his rarely-seen breakout The Slaughter Rule is as complex a portrait of male camaraderie as his performance is multi-faceted; his career apex Half Nelson a masterpiece of character study and bravely resolute irresolution that finds both qualities served in Gosling’s shattering physicality.
Regardless, neither Brando nor Wilder could seemingly carry this middling slice of twee t’wards anything resembling respectability either, Six Feet Under scribe Nancy Oliver’s goddamn-Oscar-nominated script a bi-polar smash of warm community spirit and spastic narrative. Ultimately a sympathetic tale of loneliness, Gosling - as Lars: a mildly mentally and socially handicapped man-boy - struggles with the difficult task of being a cutesy “movie retard” for whom an increasingly complicated dramatic arc is unfolding; the trick here being to rein in the performance enough to keep reality on hand, whilst not losing sight of Lars’ arced ‘reality’; a trick TVC vet Gillespie is seemingly incapable of.
Beginning with a very dramatic actorly-eyed Gosling giving us Lars’ incommunicado lifestyle on a platter, it here – but for no more of the film - is entirely devoid of the two-lane confusion the work’s remainder suffers from, each part good diluted with two parts bad: Gosling does well enough with Oliver’s overselling of the doll’s intro, Paul Schneider is a standout (as Lars’ bewildered guilt-ridden brother Gus, whose incomprehension becomes the audience ’s vicarious proxy) amongst the requisitely ‘quirky’ and dimensionless characterisations, and the central doll is a ludicrous way to explore what is, again, ultimately a warm and good idea: reversing the social isolation of the marginalised.
But unfortunately this ongoing friction of good rubbing against bad – perhaps most notably the film’s simultaneously touching/ridiculous denouement – is the most persistent aspect of Oliver’s script; its intentions well and all, but shot through with an overbearing audience-friendliness.
Opens April 3rd – Cinema Nova, Como, Brighton Bay
