"He appears," the psychologist says, "to have a delusion." The movie Lars and the Real Girl appears to be many things: a slick movie about a silicone doll, a contrived premise aiming for easy laughs, a mental breakdown of a man who chooses to push around a life-size doll in a wheelchair. It would be easy to bend toward psychoanalysis in this film, especially because Patricia Clarkson is so winsome in her role as the town therapist Dagmar, but this is a movie grounded in the messy but healing reality of community and the church. While movie reviewers have expressed concern that this movie might minimize mental illness, this is a movie about grief and mourning. Lars and the Real Girl explores both grief and mourning and the impact on a person and a community when the rituals for mourning are delayed.