There is a pointed line near the beginning of Dan in Real Life when the film’s titular hero, played by Steve Carell, first meets Marie (Juliette Binoche) and is smitten with her. She asks him, “Do you have something that is not laugh-out-loud funny or gross-out funny but just human funny?” Initially playing along with her assumption that he is a store clerk willing to recommend a good book, he somehow gradually reveals his own literate and poetic soul to a woman for the first time since his wife passed away instead of merely in the weekly advice column he writes for a newspaper.
The pleasant, unhurried nature of that early scene is emblematic of much of Dan in Real Life, a movie that sets being “human-funny” as a humble challenge and meets it with real warmth. And, for once in a long time in a romantic comedy, a love at first sight encounter is convincingly based on a meeting of the minds rather than mere infatuation or superficial lust. They know the attraction is mutual and he even gets her phone number, until a slight problem arises. Because I personally did not want to know the complication that the trailer and synopsis disclose, I will say read no further if you wish to see this movie cold.
Dan, along with his three daughters, Jane (Alison Pill), Cara (Brittany Robertson), and Lily (Marlene Lawston), is at a large family reunion at the cottage of his parents, Poppy (John Mahoney) and Nana (Dianne Wiest) and finds out later that same evening that one of his brothers, Mitch (Dane Cook), has invited his girlfriend, who turns out to be none other than Marie. This may sound like a setup for a bad sitcom with silly misunderstandings and pratfalls but the movie instead focuses on how our now maddeningly smitten couple tries to keep the resultant emotional confusion sublimated within this extended family gathering. And the story successfully mines through the many comical and romantic possibilities within this peculiar social situation that forbids Dan and Marie to say what they really feel.
It also allows Carell to bring into focus more of his low-key, awkwardly endearing quality. He had already shown some of this before in The 40-Year-Old Virgin in between displaying his gift for responsive comedy in that film’s raunchy moments. Here, playing a man trying to deal with all levels of his family (including one of his daughters who is showing signs of adolescent, hormonal urges) and his growing attraction to a woman whom he cannot be with or stop thinking about, he shows that he may be the next big actor after Tom Hanks and Jim Carrey to successfully transition from wacky comedy to everyman likeability.
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