“Dan in Real Life”
Rating: ★★★
There is a pointed line towards the beginning of Dan in Real Life when the film’s titular hero, Dan (Steve Carell) first meets Marie (Juliette Binoche) and is smitten with her. She asks him, “Do you have something that is not laugh-out-loud funny or gross-out funny but just human funny?” Initially playing along with her assumption that he is a store clerk willing to recommend a good book, he gradually reveals his sensibly poetic soul to a woman for the first time since his wife passed away four years ago instead of merely in the family advice column he writes for a newspaper.
The pleasant, unhurried nature of that early scene is emblematic of much of Dan in Real Life, a movie that sets being “human-funny” as a humble challenge and meets it with real warmth. And, for once in a long time in a romantic comedy, a love at first sight encounter is convincingly based on a meeting of the minds rather than mere infatuation or superficial lust. They know the attraction is mutual and he even gets her phone number, until a slight problem arises. Because I personally did not want to know the complication that the trailer and synopsis disclose, I will say read no further if you wish to see this movie cold.
Dan, along with his three daughters, Jane (Alison Pill), Cara (Brittany Robertson) and Lily (Marlene Lawston), is at a large family reunion at the cottage of his parents, Poppy (John Mahoney) and Nana (Dianne Wiest) and finds out later that same evening that one of his brothers, Mitch (Dane Cook) has invited over his girlfriend, who turns out to be none other than Marie. This may sound like a setup for a bad sitcom with silly misunderstandings and pratfalls but the movie instead focuses on how our now maddeningly smitten couple tries to keep the resultant emotional confusion sublimated within this extended family gathering. And the story successfully mines through the many comical and romantic possibilities within this peculiar social situation that forbids Dan and Marie to say what they really feel and puts the former in a progressively tight spot as he tries to live up to what he writes in his advice column.
It also allows Carell to bring into focus more of his low-key, awkwardly endearing quality. He had already shown some of this before in The 40-Year-Old Virgin in between displaying his gift for responsive comedy in that film’s raunchy moments. Here, playing a man trying to deal with all levels of his family (including one of his daughters who is showing signs of adolescent, hormonal urges) and his growing attraction to a woman whom he cannot be with or stop thinking about, he shows that he may be the next big actor after Tom Hanks and Jim Carrey to successfully transition from wacky comedy to everyman likeability.
Playing wonderfully against him is the versatile French actress, Juliette Binoche, who provides a soothing romantic counterpoint to Carell’s occasional, slightly manic behavior. She is simply glowing whether laughing affectionately at his unsuccessful attempts to keep his feelings at bay or subtly doting on him with longing as he seems to lie just outside of her grasp. The sporadic dalliances between the two (in whatever moments they can find alone) exude effortless charm and supply some of the best moments in the film, such as when she blindly, inadvertently approaches him looking for a towel after washing her face in the bathroom or when he tells her to stop doing “that salsa thing you do.”
There are a few missteps when the movie does intermittently rely on sitcom devices. One involves a forced awkward situation where Dan sees a naked Marie right in front of him, which feels unnecessary and tacky because what lends itself to it is not inevitable. In addition, a couple of the revelatory moments towards the end relies a little too much on coincidence. More importantly, in a movie where all the characters avoid over-emoting and play low-key, the background songs by Sondre Lerche at times seem to dictate the feelings of our hero and are distracting.
Small flaws aside, however, director Peter Hedges, whose previous movie, Pieces of April, was centered around a much more dysfunctional Thanksgiving family reunion, has delivered a lighter yet equally mature comedy that makes convincing the small situations that hinder people from expressing what they really feel, whether romantic or familial. Amidst this season filled with serious, valuable movies that rightfully challenge our depths and perceptions, it is also nice to see one that rests comfortably within our reach. We often go to the movies to see big surprises that move and shake us and here is a movie that reminds us, as in life, that little surprises can touch us, too.
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