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Dan in Real Life (PG)
© Touchstone Pictures - all rights reserved |
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| Tookey's Rating |
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5
/10 |
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| Average Rating |
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5.44
/10 |
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| Starring |
Steve Carell  , Juliette Binoche  , Dane Cook
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| Full Cast > |
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Directed by:
Peter Hedges
Written by:
Pierce Gardner, Peter Hedges
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| Released: |
2007 |
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| Genre: |
DRAMA
ROMANCE
COMEDY
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| Origin: |
US |
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| Length: |
95 |
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Soppy but likeable romance needs more realism. |
Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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This romantic comedy is an odd mixture of cute and cringeworthy, so let’s start with the positives. Dan in Real Life is a gentle, sweet-natured picture about the delights and challenges of middle-aged love. | | | |
Steve Carell (pictured left) gives a nuanced, sympathetic performance as Dan, a newspaper columnist trying to cope with bringing up three daughters – two of them spectacularly grumpy teenagers - after the death of his wife, four years previously. In a bookshop, he meets an attractive, understanding woman (Juliette Binoche, right). They bond immediately, but she’s just started a relationship with another man. Embarrassingly, this turns out to be Dan’s fitness instructor brother (Dane Cook), which makes for an uncomfortable weekend with Dan’s extended family, headed by the admirable John Mahoney and Dianne Weist. | | | |
There is amusement value, as well as pathos, in Carell’s attempts to keep his infatuation with Binoche under control; and Binoche is endearing as well, as she attempts to pretend, to others and herself, that there’s nothing between them. | | | |
Writer-director Peter Hedges comes up with some genuinely funny one-liners, such as when someone handles Dan’s one and only book, the hero’s mom cries proudly “Careful, that’s a first edition!” and Carell points out placidly that “It’s the only edition, ma.” There are a few original comic set-pieces and plenty of witty observations of family life. | | | |
Anyone with a sweet tooth should enjoy it. It’s a likeable effort, and you do end up hoping everyone lives happily ever after. The movie also confirms Hedges as a competent craftsman. His earlier screenplays have done a similar job of trying to be funny and moving at the same time – most successfully, About a Boy, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? and Pieces of April. | | | |
What undermines this movie is that Hedges tries too hard to be cute. This is the kind of picture in which the leading man wakes up fully shaved, and teenagers come up with aphorisms (such as “Love is not a feeling, it’s an ability”) that make them sound just like… well, middle-aged screenwriters. | | | |
Any difficult issues the film might have raised about family betrayal are avoided by the simplistic expedient of giving Dan’s love rival the depth of a two year-old’s paddling pool. The problem of whether Dan’s children might feel anxious about their late mother being replaced is treated with more glibness than you’d find in the average TV sitcom. And wouldn’t Dan’s children object to their father using their lives as fodder for his newspaper column? | | | |
The two classy leading performances deserved more emotional honesty from the script. And I could certainly have done without Norwegian folk-singer Sondre Lerche’s soppy songs slowing down the action and commenting upon events so laboriously that I felt like breaking his guitar over his head. | | | | |
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