Loving large

Steve Carell plays advice columnist Dan Burns in the film Dan in Real Life. (Buena Vista Pictures)

Straight on, Steve Carell is quite handsome, with a lovely smile and shelter-me eyes. But from the side, he has a funny nose, as long and pink-ended as a pencil. It may be that this cheerfully wonky face will help him become a major-player leading man. For mass appeal, it helps (men, anyway) to be a little crooked; think of Tom Hanks’ looks, seesawing between handsome and goofy.

Hanks’s career, of course, is a life lesson for Carell. Like Hanks, Carell earned his bona fides on TV, as a Daily Show star and now, as the all-unseeing boss Michael Scott on The Office. Carell specializes in men who lack self-awareness: the windy congressman in (the disastrous) Evan Almighty or the I’m-cool-with-it 40-Year-Old Virgin. But when Carell sheds the cluelessness, he’s capable of something surprisingly nuanced. As the suicidal Proust scholar in Little Miss Sunshine, he was a man adrift due to too much self-awareness, burdened by his sensitivity. Damaged sweetness seems to come easy to Carell; without his flickering vulnerability, Michael Scott would be wholly unwatchable.

In Dan in Real Life, Carell takes another baby step away from the expected and towards Hanksian longevity. He plays Dan Burns, a widowed father of three girls who makes a living writing a parental advice column: masculine Ann Landers with a touch of Dave Barry. But Dan is a minor hypocrite, preaching tolerance in print while being hugely overprotective in the flesh. He still mourns his wife by hovering — lovingly — over his children. He won’t let his oldest daughter (Canada’s Alison Pill) utilize her new driver’s licence, and is sometimes oblivious to the delicacy of his adored youngest (Marlene Lawston). Cara (Brittany Robertson), the in-between teen, is mournfully nubile, and in the throes of a first love that has Daddy reeling. When she shows up for breakfast in sweats with “You Wish” written across the butt, Carell’s quick, silent cringe feels just right.

Dan’s extended clan has gathered for a weekend in Rhode Island for the annual closing of the summer house, a rambling estate that’s supposed to look post-hippie eclectic, but is distractingly expensive. (I started calculating property taxes just looking at it.) Nana (Dianne Weist) is matronly; Poppy (John Mahoney) is patronly; both are inoffensively eccentric. The elder Burnses are surrounded by a gaggle of brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews, and while the scenes capture the buzz and tumble of a busy family at play, the sea air is salted with phoniness.

Co-writer and director Peter Hedges has made a study of the modern family. He wrote the novel What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, directed the winningly bitter Thanksgiving story Pieces of April and co-wrote the single man’s ode to fatherhood, About a Boy. All of these works contain small truths about the ways in which families protect and hurt one another, and some of those minor revelations appear in Dan, too. But the Burns family is the most plastic in Hedges’ oeuvre; every crevice of that rickety old house is mortared with cute. The family does talent shows, plays touch football, gathers ‘round the piano and sings. Okay, maybe some families do one or two of those things once in a while, but not also a men vs. women crossword competition. And group boxercise. And kayaking. Don’t these people need some alone time?

Dan, right foreground, eyes his brother's girlfriend, Marie (Juliette Binoche, left). (Buena Vista Pictures)

Dan’s family-values fantasy is an enduring throwback: Little Women or Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take it With You — with pancakes. But this is Disney, so wholesomeness is a requisite. Dan in Real Life is the first holiday-ish (American Thanksgiving), inter-generational, take-granny-on-a-day-pass movie of 2008. No swearing, no drinking, no nudey stuff. In a way, that makes it a nice contrast to the raunch and cringe comedy of the Knocked Up era. But it does make the love story at its centre oddly crotchless.

Perhaps that’s appropriate, as the story is about a love deferred. On his first morning in Rhode Island, Dan meets a fetching Gallic stranger named Marie (Juliette Binoche) in a bookstore. They bond, soul-mate style, over coffee on a romantically rainy beach, and then she informs him that she’s seeing someone else and dashes off in her car. Back at the house, she turns out to be — gasp — the new girlfriend of Dan’s doofus brother, Mitch (Dane Cook).

The rest of the weekend is a screwball comedy of sexual innuendo between Dan and Marie. Each is unsure where the other stands; each is bound by loyalty to Mitch. Mitch, to Hedges’ credit and perhaps to Cook’s, isn’t simply a moron, though he has some moronic tendencies. It’s not that he’s wrong, he’s just wrong for Marie; a bit rough and unsophisticated for this particular older woman. (I appreciated the lack of comment on the age difference between Cook and Binoche, though of course Binoche is uncharacteristically buff; her character is always in yoga pants.) The connection between Dan and Marie seems forced at first, brittle with over-laughing. But they delight in discovering one another from a distance in this odd, public setting and soon, they do seem well matched. You start rooting for them.

The film that emerges is a simple advice column about the transformative power of loving large. The benign, almost bland pleasures of Dan in Real Life are made more interesting by Carell. When he lets loose (particularly on a dance floor with a blind date played by Emily Blunt), he’s hilarious. But mostly, he’s something quieter: a man half-defeated by what he can’t have, and missing what he had. The kind of shiny sitcom romance that saves him has nothing to do with real life, of course, except as a welcome diversion from it.

Dan in Real Life opens Oct. 26.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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