Mad about film?

Craig Gillespie's Lars and the Real Girl presents exactly that scenario. But, instead of objectifying the pathology, the film offers a charming portrait of acceptance and friendship and a path into the light. And about time, too!
Cinema's taken ages to portray with compassion such behavioral subtleties. Gillespie eschews the tradition begun in the silent era, based on ersatz classifications of The Sane and The Mad.

Both blockbusters and more personal stories can hold up a misted mirror to our own irrationalities, but stories of greater emotional complexity are too often dismissed as "other people's" tales.

Paving the way for Lars in 1962 was Swedish director Arne Mattsson's Vaxdockan (The Doll), with Per Oscarsson as a socially isolated department store night-watchman who steals a mannequin, dresses her, carries on conversations and becomes even more of a recluse than ever in order to spend time with her.

As a wonderful expressionist device, his mannequin comes to life and, rather than endure his neighbour's taunts which threaten this ideal world, he turns violent.

Madness as a plot device has driven stories of doomed romance, baffling murders, inheritance thrillers and comedy mix-ups. 1948 scary melodrama The Snake Pit used camera tricks to plunge you along with poor Olivia de Havilland into a world always slipping out of control, trying to rationalise a war madness that's never really vanished.

Mel Brooks's sharply satiric High Anxiety and Milos Forman's choleric One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest helped prepare movie audiences for the more subtle approach of Rainman, but all retain the presence of "the other," most typically rendered as "the patient."

There's still lots of cinematic territory to explore, to transcend mere exposition of behavioral labels. We're endangered by an epidemic of anomie, both children and adults. Are cinema storytellers brave enough to expose our fear of involvement, to connect to the spectre of society's hopeless future, yet suggest ways to outwit despair and dysfunction?

It's not up to cinema to provide social solutions and we're fortunate that Lars and the Real Girl exposes those emotional anomalies that border our own behaviour, our own fears and coping mechanisms.

The excellent Ryan Gosling as Lars manages to extend himself to us with humour, warmth and gravity, as the film tiptoes into a modern social dilemma - why can't we commit to real relationships?

The backlash to the exuberance of the 1960s has increasingly fragmented our emotional lives. Amid the inimical polarisations of politics and business that fuel conflict, we need films that signpost a human, healing way forward.

We'd be mad not to!