Movie Log: Dan in Real Life

I enjoyed Dan in Real Life a lot while I was watching it, but, afterward, I'm not sure if the ending quite worked. (It was definitely emotionally successful, but, on a story level and as a piece of drama, there are some problems.)

It's a romantic comedy with a better-than average reason for keeping the yearning lovers apart: Dan (Steve Carell) is a widower with three growing daughters who is attending a reunion of his extended family in the ridiculously large and well-placed ancestral home of his clan, on the shore somewhere in Rhode Island. On the first morning, he heads into town (because his smothering insistence of keeping them infantilized has alienated all three of his daughters), and meets Marie (Juliet Binoche) in a bookstore. They have coffee, they hit it off, but she mentions that she's just started a relationship, and has to drive away.

About an hour later, Dan sees Marie again -- she's the new girlfriend of his younger brother Mitch (Dane Cook). The more Dan sees her, the more he's smitten. But she's also really great for Mitch -- his previous girlfriends have all been shallow, and Marie is a real adult. (Also, in a telling moment, Mitch has been calling her "Annie" -- her full name is "Anne-Marie," and he met her in a situation with a bunch of other women with names starting with M -- but he switches to calling her "Marie" after he realizes she prefers it. She's clearly important to him.) The question Dan in Real Life could have asked, if it had been more fearless, is "who needs Marie more?" [1] It doesn't go that way, since it's a Steve Carrell vehicle -- and that means we know he's going to win Marie in the end. The movie backs off a bit on Mitch's relationship with Marie, at just the time when it should be showing them becoming more connected (or failing to connect, if the filmmakers wanted to make an easy out).

So there's about two more days of Dan trying to avoid Marie, or trying to want to avoid Marie, or just trying to find something, anything, to do with his time that isn't hugely social and organized. (This is a very rough-and-tumble, organized-games-every-minute-of-the-day family.) Since the movie is so tightly focused on Dan, the audience feels for him, but it's not clear for a long time how much Marie reciprocates his feelings.

Dan in Real Life has occasional aspirations to be more than just a romantic comedy; it clearly wants to be a movie about family as well. (And ambition, in this case, is no bad thing.) It started with some quick scenes of Dan interacting with his daughters, and swiftly established him as controlling, stubborn, entirely reliant on the "because I said so" method of parenting, and completely unwilling to comprehend that his girls have grown up in the four years since their mother died. (One of the things Dan in Real Life does well is to make that point subtly, without needing any character to yell it at Dan as an attack.) He won't let his oldest daughter practice driving the car, even though she has a license. He goes ballistic at the thought of his middle daughter having any kind of contact with what must be the sweetest, most harmless boy in modern cinema. And even his littlest girl gets a huge dose of condescension on the drive north; he can't believe that she can think for herself.

Is it any wonder that these girls can't stand him? He's a deeply loving father, but he's turning into a very bad father as his girls turn into women. The rest of his family realizes this -- and clearly wants to help him get back on an even keel -- but they don't realize the source of his main tension on this particular weekend. (I get the feeling that Dan is a grumpy loner much of the time, so avoiding people and disrupting the family games is nothing new for him.)

Dan in Real Life wants to contrast Dan's job -- he's a newspaper advice columnist, on the verge of getting nationally syndicated, and several characters remark, apparently honestly, on how wonderful he is at it -- with his shown failures in his personal life. Unfortunately, we don't get a good sense of him as an giver of advice -- this is a movie that could have started earlier, added a reel or two, and even had occasional voiceovers taken from Dan's columns. The audience needs to see and believe that he's good at what he does to really understand how that doesn't follow through to his own life at all. As it is, we're told that he's good at what he does, but we don't see it -- and so, since we can see how rotten he is in day-to-day life, we end up assuming that he's either a complete hypocrite or that his column is really pretty lousy.

Dan in Real Life succeeds as a romantic comedy -- the audience feels for Dan, and comes to think Marie is wonderful and a great match for him -- but it shows hints that it aimed higher than that. Those other elements are dropped, or quickly papered over, to get to the conventional happy ending. But there's a more interesting movie -- one probably at least half an hour longer -- lurking in Dan in Real Life, and I would have like to have seen that one. The actors could have sustained that movie; it's just the script (or, possibly, the editing) that let them down.

[1] Or possibly who deserves her more, or even, to be really radical, who she wants more.