“Quirky” is a word that gets overused quite a bit. “Indie” is another. It’s a shame the terms are cliché because they’re perfect descriptors for Lars and the Real Girl, which I just finished watching. It’s been a crazy, crazy couple of weeks at work, and I’m going to have to spent quite a bit of the weekend working too. By five o’clock today my mouse-clicking finger was aching, my back was sore, and my mind had that wrung-dry feeling that I haven’t felt since the last time I had final exams.

So it’s off to Blockbuster with a friend for an evening of peace and quiet. And no thinking. Typically when I’m exhausted I just want to watch something blow up. I have a few friends who won’t watch movies with me anymore because I always pick Transformers. At Blockbuster I noticed a few things:

(a) Since this whole “ordering movies through the Intarwebz thing” came about, movie stores have started selling a lot of strange merchandise, from nasty popcorn to ice cream to t-shirts to crappy prints from Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Rebel Without a Cause. Hey, in this market you’ve got to diversify to stay alive.
(b) Am I just noticing now, or is 75% of the crap on the shelves made up of straight-to-video knockoffs of already lousy horror flicks from three years ago?
(c) Sometimes renting on a whim pays off big.

I was wandering past Sorority Secrets and Biker Babes from Mars displaying the snobbish glare of contempt that a true snob reserves for low-grade commercial pulp when something caught my attention. I pointed it out to my friend Jen, saying “Huh. This looks interesting.” On the cover was some dorky looking guy wearing ugly boots and a mustache that really needed to be shaved off holding flowers. It didn’t look like a romantic comedy, which is a good thing. When Harry Met Sally is the closest I can get to RomCom, and that’s only because it’s not at all romantic. It looked a little funky, but interesting. So we grabbed it. And a copy of Juno in case it turned out to be a stinker.

Wow! I mean . . . WOW! Watching this was like wandering into a thrift store, unsure that you really even want to be there, and finding a Rolex mixed in with faded costume jewelry and broken electronics. Brilliant acting from every member of the cast, right down to the most trivial one-line character. Flawless script, brilliant characters, and a profoundly moving story line that is quiet, unobtrusive, and doesn’t patronize the viewer by overexplaining everything.

So what’s it about? Lars is a painfully introverted guy living somewhere far to the north. (Although it’s never specified the preponderance of Scandinavian names leads me to believe it’s in Minnesota.) It’s cold. It’s winter. It’s a place of isolation. Paralyzed by damage left from never knowing his mother and being raised by a father too broken-hearted to show love, Lars isolates himself from everyone, even the family, friends, and community who love him. Human interaction is painful, and meaningful communication is impossible for him.

Until he finds a girlfriend. On the internet. That is a sex doll. That he doesn’t have sex with. Oh yes! It gets stranger! This is truly a modern-day fairy tale, and the strangeness of it all is its charm. The doll, Bianca, becomes both a love interest and an alter ego for Lars, and eventually the apex of a love triangle. I don’t want to give away too much — suffice it to say that the brilliant writing unfolds the plot so well that from the get-go you start to think it isn’t so strange for a 27-year-old man to play with dolls. And by the end, you understand why he needed to. The last two lines, both in delivery and significance, are the best concluding bits of dialogue I’ve ever seen on film. Yes, even better than “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

It’s quiet and strange enough to be soothing yet entertaining, and its cracked plot allows it to be cerebral without being boring or preachy. Flawless performances all around. This one is absolutely worth picking up, and is strange and sweet and surreal and honest all at once. You know . . . like life.