By Eric Kohn

Dan In Real Life
Directed by Peter Hedges


How the hell do you market an astonishingly effective movie like Dan in Real Life? Certainly not with the insipid close-up view of Steve Carell resting his head on a tower of pancakes. But there it is, on posters across America, seemingly announcing the combination of two dissonant ingredients that, together, surely spell awful: A talented humorist and culinary debauchery. Joy.

Yet these dispiritingly vapid advertisements achieved their means on one level, when Dan in Real Life opened with mild success in the theaters of the country’s smaller cities, while less publicity pressure was applied in the metropolitan areas where cynical sorts surely scoffed at the lifeless one-sheet. That social dichotomy is unfortunate; Dan in Real Life serves up middlebrow expectations as a dramedy of midlife romantic confusion, but it achieves efficaciousness beyond pandering to the lowest common denominator. Not disarmingly funny as much as shrewdly complex, Dan in Real Life has strengths belied by the image of its poster boy.

Paradoxically, however, Carell plays such a spot-on single dad that he finally manages to portray the exact doleful everyman audiences have wanted from him as a movie star. (As a television star, he’s a mad genius of awkward timing on NBC’s “The Office,” but you probably already knew that.) As Dan Burns, the author of the eponymous self-help newspaper column and a widower with three whiny girls, Carell’s character doesn’t represent a radical break with tradition—but he justifies an overly exhausted archetype. Carell gives Dan a bland, muted demeanor, which is exactly what makes him so believable.

Dan comes across as such a boring guy and his world feels so phony that the first 10 minutes of Dan in Real Life are unbearably cheesy. Watching Carell discontentedly go through dad duties, picking up his kids from school, lecturing them about relationships and driving up to his parent’s woodsy home for the holidays is like having the highlights from “Full House” injected straight into your cranium.

But the director, Peter Hedges, whose last credit was the indie hit Pieces of April, lets his technique gradually take hold. It takes an observant eye to catch the multilayered cleverness of Dan in Real Life, but it’s definitely there. Hedges actually applies the monotonous storytelling implied by the poster art to sedate viewers and catch them off-guard. Dan shows up at his parents’ home and fields the insistence of his family members that he needs to find a new mate. Then, quite suddenly, a fresh presence breaks this pattern of mundanity in the form of a cutie named Marie (Juliette Binoche), a mysterious woman Carell hits it off with at a local bookstore before realizing that she’s dating his brother (Dane Cook). What follows is a comedy of misdirected intentions, as Carell and his would-be damsel in distress attempt to skirt the issue of attraction without the rest of family catching on.

That might sound like a contrived twist, but everything dopey about the movie’s imitations of conventional comedic rhythms (it even ends with a dance number!) serves to counteract our expectations and set up the surprise of its originality.
Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman wisely looked at Dan in Real Life as “a sitcom directed by Eric Rohmer,” but I detected traces of Robert Altman in its strategic dissection of crowd dynamics: Dan is frequently surrounded, buried and ultimately smothered in his family’s ridiculous quibbling, shown in long shots encompassing the entire ensemble. Then they all abruptly exit the frame, leaving the solemn protagonist alone to contemplate his woes. The scheme works because each relative clearly represents an element of Dan’s tangled psyche. Seeing it assembled in this subtle arrangement, we can view every angle of his confusion at once. It’s a choose-your-own-dilemma brand of mise-en-scene.

Proving you can’t judge a story by its premise, Dan in Real Life has an ironic title. The main character exists in a sea of fantasies, drifting from one false source of comfort to another, careening from his boring, sitcom-like lifestyle to a giddy, impractical romantic pursuit. The movie’s inevitable climax involves his confrontation with this ongoing superficiality. 

A happy side-effect of Dan in Real Life comes from Cook’s restrained performance, suggesting the actor’s abilities have greater potential than the virtually unforgivable crappiness of Good Luck Chuck. Now there’s a movie that delivers on its poster.