Diary of a Moviegoer #2: Dan in Real Life

Yarr! There be “spoilers” ahead.

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Dan in Real Life (2007) is about an advice columnist named Dan Burns (Steve Carell) whose column is, like the movie, called “Dan in Real Life.” I expected this film to be comprised largely of scenes in which Dan behaves in a manner inconsistent with the kind of advice he dispenses to his readers to comic effect, and had I watched only the first twenty and last thirty minutes of it, that’s basically what I would have gotten. I would have been impressed by the pains the filmmakers took to flesh out Dan’s character and by their willingness to let us extrapolate from this what kind of advice he must give, instead of, say, just beginning the movie with him reading one of his columns in voiceover or something. It might also have struck me that the film seemed a bit weighty for a Steve Carell comedy vehicle, although I might have just assumed that I’d missed all the wacky bits or that it simply wasn’t very funny; at any rate, I’d have seen little to challenge my assumption that Dan in Real Life was, in fact, a Steve Carrel comedy vehicle.

The middle fifty minutes, though . . . whew! But let me back up a bit: the film begins with a carefully observed depiction of a single father first bundling his three daughters off to school, then picking them up afterwards and heading off (from New Jersey) to a family gathering in Rhode Island. Although this sequence (intentionally) isn’t especially humorous, it does fulfill all of the functions of the first act of a comedy: it establishes what kind of man Dan is (sober, conscientious, responsible) and sets the stage for the film’s primary conflict (Dan in real life vs. “Dan in Real Life”) with Dan’s emphatic statement to his 15 year-old daughter that “you can’t know in three days” that you’re in love.

As expected, the next fifty minutes of the film develop this conflict further. Dan meets cute a woman named Marie (Juliette Binoche) in a bookstore who turns out to be the woman his brother Mitch (Dane Cook) is bringing home to meet the family. Dan wants to woo her anyway, but this would be contrary to what he himself would counsel and would thus discredit him as both an advice columnist and a father, so he tries to suppress this desire. The problem is that he’s unable to control himself around her, and since the filmmakers have conspired to repeatedly place them in close proximity with one another, wacky high jinks ensue.

Except that they don’t, really. Yes, there is one scene in which Dan and Marie end up in the shower together, and another one in which he’s “forced” to stare at her ass during an aerobics session, and these are as contrived and, frankly, stupid as you’d think they would be. But the rest of this middle portion of the film is different. There is, first of all, the fact that throughout it Steve Carell plays Dan not as a hypocrite who cluelessly can’t or selfishly won’t follow his own advice, but as an earnest, well-intentioned man torn between two “right” courses of action. Check out his anguished expression in this scene, his response to hearing a line from his own book being stolen by Mitch:

This is the beaten down visage of a man who has just realized that he’s forgoing the pursuit of true love, which he believes is as rare as “winning the lottery,” for someone who is insincere and undeserving. Dan knows that he should pursue Marie because he’s the one who has “the only key to her heart,” because they are soul mates; he knows he shouldn’t because it isn’t permitted by his position within either the family or society in general. Carell is utterly convincing as a man who can’t decide what to do and is heading for a nervous breakdown as a result.

And then there’s the family dynamic:

Throughout the film the Burns family is presented as a monolithic, undifferentiated mass that is frequently arrayed against Dan and Mitch, the only two single adults in the family, as it is here. The Burns family is quirky, kind, and non-judgmental — almost oppressively so, in fact. During family time, which is pretty much all the time, one is always cheerful. Serious criticism is not permitted, but no other subject is taboo. The family cannot help Dan work through his problem, because the family is his problem: he can’t spend time with the adults, as that would involve prolonged exposure to Marie and Mitch; he can’t spend excessive amounts of time with the children, because they will reject him at some point for behaving unlike an adult, for acting “weird”; he can’t tell any one family member what’s bothering him, because to tell one of them would be to tell all of them, including Mitch; he can’t lash out at Mitch, because that isn’t allowed; he can’t spend time alone, because once it’s known that something is troubling Dan, the family will not rest until they “make it better”; he can’t leave, because he can’t abandon his daughters.

The middle fifty minutes of Dan in Real Life constitute a dead-on portrait of a man in an impossible social situation who’s slowly but surely splitting apart at the seams. Unable to either surrender Marie to Mitch or steal her away from him, Dan begins behaving in an increasingly erratic manner in a desperate attempt to provoke some sort of showdown that will resolve the matter for him. What’s interesting is that this would seemingly have to result in some sort of family crisis: if Dan steals Marie away or behaves unpleasantly enough that she either ceases to like him or leaves altogether, the family would have to either condemn his actions or effectively side with him against Mitch; alternatively, Dan might suffer a not very comedy-like emotional collapse.

None of these things happen, of course. Instead, Marie realizes that she loves Dan back, in part through her discovery — in a book inexplicably given to her by Mitch — that the sweet nothings that her boyfriend has been whispering in her ears are Dan’s. There is a brief dust-up when the family discovers them together, but it blows over quickly: Mitch has another woman waiting in the wings, so he doesn’t stay upset for long, and the family tells Dan to go see about the girl who is now unproblematically his. Dan learns that it is possible to fall in love in less than three days, which according to Hollywood movie logic means that his fifteen year-old daughter must be in love with her boyfriend, too, and that Mitch must be in love with Ruthie Draper (Emily Blunt) as well, and the movie ends with all of these singles happily coupled and those others who were already married staying as they are.

So what then to do with Dan in Real Life? It contains an accurate representation of something I recognize from my own life but not from the movies, the obligatory social situation that cannot be escaped without causing possibly irreparable harm to oneself and/or others; it does not, however, provide any insight into how such a situation can be dealt with (using as it does blatantly artificial means to resolve the conflict in the film). It contains a terrific performance by Steve Carell, but one that may be in the service of a movie that in the final analysis I don’t think is very good. It contains an interesting critique of a “perfect family” ideal, but I don’t know how intentional this is. So maybe I:

1. Being a child of the DVD age, ignore the parts of the movie I don’t like or that I’m not interested in: I basically regard chapters 4-10 of the Dan in Real Life DVD as their own film.

2. Look at the rest of director Peter Hedges’ oeuvre and see how “family” figures into his other films: Gareth McFeely says there’s something there, and maybe he’s right.

3. File Dan in Real Life away as being a “somewhat intriguing film that features a good performance by Steve Carell” and move on to take another look at Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale (2008), which contains a superficially similar, but much more interesting family.

I’d be going with #3 all the way, but A Christmas Tale isn’t out on DVD yet. If I see Pieces of April (2003) at the library in the near future, I might have to choose door #2 . . .