Who’s more unrealistic: Michael Scott, the charmingly inept, stuffed shirt of a boss at the head of the Scranton branch of Dunder Mifflin in NBC’s The Office or Dan Burns, the advice columnist who is remarkably emotionally immature in Dan in Real Life? More importantly, for which role should Steve Carell be more applauded? In the former, he consistently raises the bar from within a uniformly talented cast and crew. In the latter, he shows a strong dramatic muscle and manages to stand out in a film with a weak script and a bunch of actors going through the motions.
In Dan in Real Life, the title character, a widower whose three daughters grow further apart from him by the day, seeks solace in a family reunion. Unexpectedly, he finds love in Marie (Juliette Binoche), whom he meets in a bookshop and connects with over coffee and an oversized muffin. Things look promising and, though she points that she has a new boyfriend, she gives over her phone number. Complications arise when Dan returns to find that the boyfriend in question is his brother Mitch (Dane Cook).
Dan’s tunnel vision in trying to pry Marie from his brother slowly exposes hypocrisies in his parenting skills. He ruins a family dinner by reciting a laundry list of Mitch’s girlfriends, flirts with Marie during a touch football game, becomes an introvert when his parents (Dianne Wiest and John Mahoney) express concern over his moods, and uses a beautiful fan of his work to make Marie jealous, all the while ignoring the tremendous opportunity to use the reunion to win over his daughters.
The character, for all his supposed parental wisdom, is rather unlikable, and so it’s to Carell’s credit that, at any point, the audience roots for him over a neutralized Cook. Carell hits all the right notes when the poorly constructed script allows it and navigates the low points with grace. His case is helped by the young actresses who play his daughters, each contributing laughs and poignancy at the right times.
It’s not that the ideas behind Dan in Real Life don’t work; indeed, the template of a goofy family forced to live together for a few days has seen great success (see Meet the Parents). The problem is that writer/director Peter Hedges doesn’t take any great risks over the course of the movie, either in confronting Dan’s self-centeredness or exploiting his back story. The movie, which is well filmed and acted, has a feel of an arthouse film, but Hedges is either too unwilling or unable to raise the stakes. As such, you won’t regret seeing Dan in Real Life, and you should get some enjoyment out of it, but you’ll be left wondering if there could have been more.
Rating: * * * of 5
Oh for god sake!!!! Only 3 stars??? It was a beautiful BEAUTIFUL movie!!
Simple, fun, emotional…
I just loved it!!