Early in Peter Hedges’s “Dan in Real Life,” the title character, at a bookstore, meets the woman he will fall in love with. Mistaking him for an employee, she breathlessly tries to describe the kind of book she’s looking for. (He responds by gathering up a random assortment of volumes that includes the poems of Emily Dickinson, “Anna Karenina” and “Everybody Poops.”) “I want something funny,” she says. “But not laugh-out-loud funny. And definitely not making-fun-of-people funny. I want something human funny.”
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It does not take long to recognize this as a declaration of the film’s own intentions. Its moral is “expect to be surprised,” and the surprise is how frequently it succeeds. “Dan in Real Life” is neither wildly farcical nor mockingly cruel, but rather, for the most part, winningly gentle and observant.
The film, with a script Mr. Hedges wrote with Pierce Gardner, follows Dan (Steve Carell), a widower with three daughters, to a family gathering at his parents’ rambling vacation home in Rhode Island. His encounter with that woman in the bookstore — her name is Marie, and she has the good fortune to be played by Juliette Binoche — leads to quite a bit of awkwardness. It turns out that she is the new girlfriend of Dan’s bachelor brother, Mitch (an astonishingly tolerable Dane Cook), and she’s joining the clan for the weekend.
It’s a big group, headed by John Mahoney and Dianne Wiest and including Dan’s three girls, a bunch of other kids and some fine grown-up actors like Amy Ryan and Norbert Leo Butz in too-small roles. Comic misunderstandings give way to hard feelings, which produce even bigger comic misunderstandings and harder feelings, and then before you know it the credits are rolling over an outdoor wedding scene while a cool-looking band sings a cool-sounding song.
But even though this denouement is the perfect-storm mother of all clichés, there are fewer of these along the way than you might expect. Yes, there is the maudlin back story of Dan’s widowhood, and the familiar scenario of all that quirky kin stuffed into one house for a few days. But Mr. Hedges, a seasoned screenwriter, showed in his directing debut, “Pieces of April,” that he could infuse tired conventions of domestic comedy with fresh life and real intelligence. And here, working in a less self-consciously eccentric mode, he does it again.
“Dan in Real Life” does not strain after big conceptual jokes, but rather finds humor in things people might actually say. The characters are funny not just to us but also to one another. Like most people, they use humor as a means of communication and self-defense, which gives the movie a genial, unhurried, lived-in feeling.
The story and the characters do wear a little thin in places. Ms. Binoche is radiant and lovely, and at 43 more than matches the sexiness of 24-year-old Emily Blunt, who shows up briefly as a potential romantic rival. (Both women are supposed to be around the same age as Dan, or Mitch, or something.) But exactly who Marie is, apart from the embodiment of wonderfulness, is never quite clear. Nor is it entirely plausible that she would fall for both the dim, genial Mitch and the cerebral, uptight Dan.
Dan, like many characters played by Mr. Carell, has the curious quality of seeming to be more complicated than he really is. The wary, wry detachment that he brings to each new role is starting to feel less like a hallmark than a sign of fatigue. And, as in the dreadful “Evan Almighty,” he is forced to depict a character learning valuable lessons. (The genius of Michael Scott, the manager he plays on “The Office,” is that Michael is congenitally impervious to learning.) Dan, a onetime novelist, now writes a parenthood column, but though he is a conscientious father, he is not always understanding or compassionate.
Advice columnist, advise thyself! My own advice would be not to expect too much from “Dan in Real Life.” That way you can be pleasantly surprised.
“Dan in Real Life” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some sexually suggestive situations.
DAN IN REAL LIFE
Opens today nationwide.
Directed by Peter Hedges; written by Pierce Gardner and Mr. Hedges; director of photography, Lawrence Sher; edited by Sarah Flack; music by Sondre Lerche; production designer, Sarah Knowles; produced by Jon Shestack and Brad Epstein; released by Touchstone Pictures. Running time: 95 minutes.
WITH: Steve Carell (Dan), Juliette Binoche (Marie), Dane Cook (Mitch), Alison Pill (Jane), Brittany Robertson (Cara), Marlene Lawston (Lilly), Emily Blunt (Ruthie), Amy Ryan (Eileen), Norbert Leo Butz (Clay), Dianne Wiest (Nana) and John Mahoney (Poppy).
