Dan in Real Life (**1/2)

This is a movie about love at first sight. The victim, Dan, is an advice columnist, widower, and father of three girls (Steve Carrell), and the object of his adoration is a free spirit (Juliette Binoche) he meets in a bookstore in a fashion that probably can only happen in a screenplay. (No matter how charmed a woman is by a man, she will not scoop up both a Pablo Neruda poetry volume and “Everybody Poops” and buy both.) The setting is a New England family reunion, and the conflict arises when Dan learns that he is smitten with his brother’s (Dane Cook) girlfriend. Through pancake breakfasts and group jazz-ercise and charades, Dan is tormented, but in a sort of light-comedy way rather than one that will make the audience feel truly sad for him. Similarly played is the angst of the daughters, the oldest of whom Dan does not wish to drive, and the second oldest of whom he does not wish to date. The youngest, a fourth grader, remains loyal as the others resent him, though in a way that suggests it will all pass. (As the middle daughter, Brittany Robertson lends believability to her teen heartsickness, though.)

Light on plot, only occasionally corny, the movie pleasantly winds down a road whose end is only too clear. The delicately buoyant score and songs by Sondre Lerche give the film a gentle, wistful feel. I only wish there was something more than surface appeal. One of the hardest things to do really well, I think, is to credibly show people connecting. Director-writer Peter Hedges, who previously made the pretty-good indie hit Pieces of April, accomplishes this largely with a montage scene. Yet the entire film revolves around the viewer being convinced that, via an afternoon of conversation, Dan cannot forget this woman who, it is implied, is the first he’s been interested in since his wife died.

Maybe it’s me, but it would have given the movie some dramatic heft if there’d been a little more pathos to the story. Even the end, which does not involve the brothers deciding to share, is too easy, like you can have a plot like this without anyone getting truly hurt. (The losing brother gets what I call the consolation girlfriend, an annoyingly overused plot device used to avoid having the audience feel bad for or about any of the characters. See just about any Hollywood movie involving a romantic rivalry, unless one of the rivals is a total jerk.) I guess you’d call this a feel-good picture, but it would have been better had Hedges let us feel a little sadness too.

IMDB link

reviewed 10/27/07