Throughout his career, Ryan Gosling has tended to gravitate towards superserious roles—a drug-addicted high school teacher, a wayward and intense high school dropout, a steely getaway driver-turned-action-hero, a drug-dealing assassin. His comic roles have been fewer and further between, but when he has showcased his lighter side, the defining adjective of these characters has generally been: “charming.” Whether he’s playing a gawky high school football player, an oily dating coach, an awkward, isolated young man burying his feelings in a life-size doll, or a blue-collar underdog smitten with the pretty rich girl, Gosling has made a career out of projecting a voluble, irresistible charm.
But Holland March, the grieving widower and middling private eye he plays in the noir-ish action comedy The Nice Guys, is different from any other comedic role Gosling has played. Holland isn’t suave or particularly likable, he’s pathetic—he’s hit rock bottom, an alcoholic who makes a living scamming elderly women by taking on their dead-end cases. (When we first lay eyes on him, he’s fallen asleep, fully clothed, in his bathtub.) He’s a terribly irresponsible father, with an uber precocious tween daughter named Holly who is better at taking care of him than he is of her. (He lets her do all of the driving, especially when he needs to hit the bar.) He’s also just not very good at his job, terrible at convincing strangers to give up information because he just seems like such a joke. It’s Jackson (Russell Crowe), the enforcer who teams up with Holland to solve the convoluted mystery at the center of The Nice Guys, who’s the silver-tongued, effective one.
And yet Holland seems unaware of how much of a mess he is—perhaps his perpetually boozed-up state is clouding his self-perception—even as he is constantly fumbling for his gun and having bizarre hallucinations involving human-sized bees. It’s almost as though his character thinks he is a “Ryan Gosling type,” despite how dopey and ham-fisted he really is. Following a zany car chase with adversaries—in which a drunken Holland winds up crashing his car onto the side of the road—he cracks wise to the cop on the scene, “You know who else was just following orders? Hitler.” The cop, of course, is not amused. Later, he tries to hit on a woman holding them up at gunpoint and fails miserably. Holland is essentially played as a crash-test dummy with feelings—he falls from several inconceivably high heights and is seriously maimed on numerous occasions. This persona allows the movie to toy in a meta way with Gosling’s image as a slickster by making a central joke out of the way his bumbling antics have relentlessly, implausibly smooth outcomes. He falls from a building, and rolls safely down a hill—thus discovering a dead body that helps unlock the whole mystery they are trying to solve. He somehow survives every near-death experience, leading him to at one point squeal (while dodging bullets), “I don’t think I can die!”
As BuzzFeed’s Allison Willmore has pointed out, this is a departure from his other recent roles in Crazy, Stupid, Love and The Big Short, where he plays “amusing variations on the same sort of preening dirtbag.” In both he’s well-dressed and fast-talking in that white alpha-male style, effortlessly straddling the line between douchey and hot. These characters each know exactly who they are, and the world mostly agrees. (Jacob gets all of the women in the former, and Jared easily cashes in on the stock market crash in the former, due largely in part to his polished pitch.) But The Nice Guys wrings great comedy from the tension between his self-image and the way he alienates everyone around him. And somehow, he manages to charm us anyway.
