Lars and the Real Girl

2007 Sidney Kimmel Entertainment. Starring Ryan Gosling, Emily Mortimer, and Paul Schneider. Director: Craig Gillespie. (1 hr 46 min. Film and DVD.) A psychological drama. Editor's Note: This film was APPPAH's choice for the 2009 Cinema Recognition Award.

 

Movie reviewed by Pamela Yenawine*

Louisville, KY

 

        As many of us know from our own encounters with birth trauma in ourselves and in our clients, the effects remain hidden to the casual observer. Thanks to so many pioneers, researchers, writers and great voices (many of whom are members of APPPAH), the veil is being lifted for all to see.

        In Lars and the Real Girl, most people, and many of the reviews I read, perceived this film as a comic but poignant tale of a young man who moves from extreme, debilitating emotional and social isolation into a new relationship with his family and his community. The surprise is how he does this with the help of a life-size doll whom he treats as a real person with tremendous respect, tenderness and attention. In turn, the whole town starts treating Lars with the same tenderness and attention and by the end of the movie, Lars has come out of his shell.

        But what great trauma did the inflated doll Bianca really speak to in his life? In the unfolding of the story, we learn that Lars and his brother suffered the fairly recent loss of their father who had been depressed since his wife died. And, in just a few words buried in the script, words of seemingly negligible significance, we learn that Lars’ mother died giving birth to him! For those of us attuned to birth trauma and the expression of that trauma in a human being’s life, the alarm goes off!

       I wondered if screenwriter Nancy Oliver was drawing on experiences of her own or simply on her wisdom about the primal wounds which typically abound at birth.  I’ll likely never know the answer, and I don’t need to know in order to recommend this amazing movie to all who are sensitive to and working to heal birth trauma.
     
*Pamela is a cranio-sacral therapist and trained birth doula.