Review

Review Date: 4-November-07
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Just OK

Dan in Real Life (2007)

Dan Burns made me feel like a sucker. For some reason I had thought his "real life" went deeper than the standard Hollywood script of a lonely heart looking for love, and my incorrect assumption led me to watch a kind of movie I generally avoid. We all know the drill: a nice guy meets an ideal woman (cutely) and falls for her (immediately), but she is attached to an unsuitable schmuck (inevitably) so they engage in acts of denial (immaturely) until their story reaches its ending (happily). Caring spectators offer sage advice (occasionally) and amusing mistakes are made (gratuitously). Dab your eyes and let the credits roll.

"Dan in Real Life" does try to disguise its common nature, but whether this is admirable or reprehensible I am not entirely sure. For example, the story does not unfold in the city but at the Rhode Island beach house where Dan's parents annually gather their brood. (Starfish instead of Starbucks. I have to admit it's quaint.) Then the lead actors look like genuine adults. Steve Carell applies his native gravitas and unchiseled attractiveness to the role of the hero, while Juliette Binoche is so warm and lovely as his temptress, Marie, that you can almost buy his instantaneous passion. (Binoche is the French Julia Roberts: her features resemble those of the American star, but as a European her beauty makes itself known in undertones instead of shouts. She is formed on a human scale instead of an Amazon Barbie scale. I believe in her.)

Other embellishments to the norm do not work as well. The schmuck to whom Marie is attached happens to be Dan's brother (Dane Cook), who is too much a puppy to qualify for her league. You would expect a love triangle involving brothers to produce extreme unpleasantness, but Dan's creator, Peter Hedges, protects him from anything that can't be played as a joke. So the threat of unusual tension just evaporates (lamely). In a stab at irony, Dan makes a living writing a popular advice column for the newspaper, although most of the lessons to which he and the audience are subjected come from the mouths of, not quite babes, but his three daughters ranging roughly in age from 17 (Alison Pill), to 15 (Brittany Robertson), to nine (Marlene Lawston). Of all the characters (the family includes additional brothers and sisters and cousins), these are the hardest to digest. Their one-dimensional personalities and timely flashes of preternatural wisdom seem contrived to make Dan's past more pathetic and future neatly tied. They caused me to wish that "Dan in Real Life" embraced its identity as a formulaic romantic comedy — although if it had, I would not have watched it at all.

Copyright © 2007 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.