Patricia Clarkson wears an unidentified watch

At her desk in a small-town clinic, papers in one hand and a coffee mug at the other, Dagmar wears a watch on a brown leather strap at the wrist. Patricia Clarkson plays Dagmar in Lars and the Real Girl, Craig Gillespie's 2007 comedy of enormous tenderness, the family doctor and psychologist a Wisconsin town leans on when one of its own loses his grip on what is real.

Lars, played by Ryan Gosling, is a painfully shy young man who orders a life-size doll online and introduces her to the town as his girlfriend, and Dagmar's quiet genius is to play along, treating the delusion as a slow path back rather than a thing to argue away. The watch is a plain dress watch on leather, a clinician's unshowy piece, but the dial gives up no maker in the frame, so the brand stays unidentified.

It is the watch of the one adult in the film who keeps exact, patient time with a man who has stopped being able to. Dagmar's whole method is duration, weekly visits booked as appointments for the doll, and a town that agrees to wait as long as it takes.