Dan in Real Life Release Date: October 26, 2007 Starring: Steve Carell, Juliette Binoche, Dane Cook, Alison Pill, John Mahoney, Dianne Wiest, Amy Ryan, Emily Blunt Directed by: Peter Hedges
One of the more pleasant surprises of the current season, Dan in Real Life is a smart, sweet, and thoroughly disarming ensemble comedy that isn't afraid to wear its humanism on its sleeve. The second directorial effort from Hedges, the novelist and screenwriter who debuted as a helmer with 2003's Pieces of April, Dan is a lighter, more accomplished piece that glistens with sharp insight while still delivering as many effective zingers and pratfalls as you'd expect in a contemporary comedy.
A lot of that is thanks to Carell's lead performance as a somewhat hapless parenting-advice columnist, a widowed dad of three seemingly very different daughters who's having a hard time with the way they're growing up — particularly middle girl Cara (Brittany Robertson), who's just discovered boys and thongs. A long weekend in upstate New York with Dan's extended family — mother and father (Mahoney and Weist), aerobics instructor brother Mitch (Cook) and various and sundry other sibs and in-laws — is supposed to impose a time-out on domestic infighting, but of course does not. We see Dan's got a peculiar position in his clan, underscored by the fact that his sleeping quarters for the weekend are in the house's laundry room.
Off on an extended morning jaunt after being specifically ordered by his mom to make himself scarce, Dan has a bookstore encounter with the beguiling Marie (Binoche), who stirs up feelings he hasn't had in some time. The film is pretty deft about confronting the potential for hokieness in its own premise; after hearing Dan's story, Marie smilingly says, "So, you're one of those widowers with three daughters who preys on women in bookstores," which nicely deflates the viewer's wariness about whether the picture takes its own commonplaces at face value. Similarly, after we learn that this woman, who in mere hours has led Dan to believe that he could fall in love again, is, alas, brother Mitch's date for the weekend, Hedges has a full enough grasp of his characters that he's able to show us both Dan and Marie dealing with their dilemma in raw childish ways; the standard Hollywood treatment of this sort of thing generally casts one character as the flake and the other as the straight arrow. It's clear Hedges has an appreciation of both Renoir's Rules of the Game and Lubitsch's bedroom comedies, and while Dan doesn't reach the heights of those films, it's got a consistent sensitivity and intelligence that's rarer than it's ever been in American comedies.
Carell is first among almost-equals in the cast, playing a thoroughly sane and kind individual still flummoxed by pain and loss who is also a bit of a goofball. One scene, which involves him showering with all his clothes on before tumbling off a roof, is remarkable not only for the comic virtuosity with which it's performed, but its seemingly unlikely plausibility. Binoche is as charming and complex as she's ever been, while generally intolerable comic Dane Cook is here better than palatable playing the "hey, dude" sort of guy he probably really is.
READ MORE: Juliette Binoche Q&A
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