Lars and the Real Girl is a movie about a lot of things. The movie evolves from the lonely life of Lars (Ryan Gosling) into the life of an entire community. The first scene was a beautiful portrait of loneliness. Lars looks out the window from his kitchen onto a neighboring house in the mid of winter. The sky is gray as if taken from one of those commercials for some sort of anti-depressant. When his sister-in-law emerges from the house he is staring at and heads in his direction he steps back from the window into the shadows where she won't see him. She does, and invites him to breakfast. His answer is as close to "no" without hurting anyone's feelings as possible. But before she runs back to her house through the (Maine?) winter Lars gives her his blanket to combat the cold. He makes sure she puts it all the way around her. In this opening scene we are shown the hole Lars exists in, but we are also given a measure of hope and potential. It is the small, almost thoughtless scenes, like this one that makes the movie. And it is the small, almost thoughtless gestures of a town that makes a community. One small nice gesture may not seem like a qualifier for the love of community, but when they add up over time, relationships build and overlap so that a group of people somehow become more than neighbors.

The premise of the movie is that Lars has a delusion whereby he believes a blowup sex doll is his girlfriend Bianca. At the instructions of a family doctor, everyone is to go along with the delusion until Lars no longer needs it. The movie defies genre, it's never exactly sad and it's never exactly funny. There are moments you'll laugh and their are moments you'll try to explore the depths of Lars' brain only to come up wet and still confused. But the movie is never just about Lars. It's never just about family or community. If anything, the movie is about winter. It's about the journey from mid november until the thaw. It's about surviving that period. Underneath all the layers of clothes and big snow boots of this movie, there is something else that the characters have, another form of protection, one that Lars has never had.

A winter alone is something I never want to experience. There is something about the gray skies (of which this movie without exception has) and cold weather and empty streets and buried faces and hurried footsteps that makes winter feel almost inhuman. In the spring and the summer and the fall we have something else, we have the world, and it is a comfort that at least nature isn't against us. But when it changes, when we are subjected to the deep freeze every year, we are reminded that it is not always for us that this planet exists. So when Lars courts his doll, real to him, we can only sympathize, we can only go along with it until the spring. And isn't that the responsibility of the community? To make little concessions for others, to remind them that spring is always waiting on the other side.

And as we travel with Lars through the winter we realize his winter has lasted much longer than ours. And as we travel along with him we see how it is the community, not his blow-up doll girlfriend, that tendered the growth of spring inside of him, from seeds that had already been planted. And likewise we get to watch as the community remembers through him what they are in place for.