Real Life unpretentious

By Dan Moore

Published Oct. 30, 2007

"Dan in Real Life" is a movie begging to be dismissed. Its very title is fodder for lazy reviewers; this "real life" movie takes place, for the most part, in one of those quaint-yet-palatial New England vacation homes that exists only in movies and in the wills of lucky hedge-fund managers. That's the least of its problems, critically. It is a comedy about the problems of a sprawling upper-middle-class white family that does not bite with angry satire. It is a comedy that features parenting and small, precocious children. It is a comedy that co-stars Dane Cook. But it succeeds because it does, better than almost any other movie this year, one important thing: It draws its characters roundly, and then likes them.

Steve Carell is the eponymous Dan, a widowed family-advice columnist who has trouble taking his own advice. But this is no "Miss Lonelyhearts;" he's not about to have an existential crisis because of his own problems, let alone those of the letter-writers. He and his three daughters, with whom he is on good-but-not-movie-good terms, leave for the vacation home to spend a weekend with their family, where he meets and charms a beautiful, compatible woman at a bookstore. He gets back to the house just in time to watch his brother (Cook) present his new girlfriend — the same woman — to the family.

This simple plot allows the movie to linger among the characters and slowly reveal Dan's story. "Real Life" is almost completely free from clumsy expository moments; there's no long, stultifying informative conversation about his dead wife or proper-noun-filled story dump in the opening scenes, because the movie is confident that we'll get to know the characters once they appear on screen.

As family comedies go, "Real Life" is neither a schlocky, slapstick "Are We Done Yet?" nor a sneering, affected "Little Miss Sunshine." In a page from Carell's day job at "The Office," we cringe because the characters are generally good people, not because they're so very gauche and unintelligent. There's a Lubitschian tenderness to the proceedings, combined with a family dynamic so pitch perfect that Dane Cook comes off as positively likeable, that makes the low-key humor funnier than the sum of its jokes. That genial tone makes the already-hilarious set pieces — such as a scene in which Dan's parents try to have a one-on-one talk with him that becomes as crowded as a Marx Brothers stateroom, with family yelling advice over one-another — into eruptive moments; half of the slow-build necessary in great comedic scenes is done before these even begin.

This movie is not perfect; this might be the rare comedy that should extend past its 95 minute running time because the ending isn't completely satisfying, and occasionally the sentiment becomes too much for even this movie's sturdy frame to hold. But this is one of the best-executed family comedies in some time, funny and genuinely human at once, and the way it navigates past all of the possible pitfalls and headline writers lying in wait is truly remarkable.