Dan in Real Life
Peter Hedges (2007)
The temperament behind the camera – and what the film will turn out to be – is obvious from an early stage. It’s evident in the wry, annoying songs, written and performed by Sondre Lerche. And more or less evident in the basic scenario: journalist Dan Burns is the loving, too caring (over-controlling) father of three girls. In his newspaper column (from which the film takes its title) he gives advice to readers – advice imbued, we’re told, with family values and, we assume (since Dan is played by Steve Carell), with transforming wit also. Dan is conspicuously womanless: we wonder what happened to the girls’ mother and soon learn that she died. Being widowed young rather than divorced gives Dan a built-in nobility and invites our sympathy – it’s plain to see that the conscientious father and agony uncle is a lonelyheart himself. It’s a tribute to the cast of Dan in Real Life, especially Steve Carell, that you’re not only engaged with the picture for most of its ninety-eight minutes but also (unconsciously) hopeful that the piece will turn out more interesting than it’s bound not to be. You realise this when the feeble and predictable climax arrives and you feel disappointed.
Dan and his girls – under protest from the middle one, fifteen-year-old Cara, who wants to be with her first serious boyfriend – travel from their New Jersey home to an annual family reunion with Dan’s parents in Rhode Island. The Burns family is large and I never worked out who everyone was. Because Dan’s younger brother Mitch, a fitness trainer in New York, is bringing ‘a friend’ with him, his mother tells Dans that he’ll be sleeping in the ‘special room’. (He gets little sleep. The size of the gathering generates an endless supply of laundry and the washing machine is at the foot of Dan’s bed. There’s an infuriating swinging light cord at the top end.) Next morning, Dan goes out to buy papers and, in a local bookshop, meets and immediately falls for a dazzling French woman. He comes home and tells the newly-arrived Mitch about the meeting and the good news – the whole family’s concerned that Dan’s still pining four years after he lost his wife – spreads like wildfire through the household. Then Mitch introduces his ‘friend’ Marie: she’s the woman Dan met in the bookshop.
The short filmography of Peter Hedges, who co-wrote the screenplay with Pierce Gardner, is already long on family relationships. He adapted What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993) from his own novel and About a Boy (2002) from Nick Hornby’s. The only other film Hedges has so far directed is Pieces of April (2003), which he also wrote. Dan’s falling for his brother’s new woman is a serviceable comic situation in which to put fraternal love and family loyalties to the test but Hedges is reluctant to pursue the ironic possibilities of the gathering of the clan, the convivial obligations of which are terrifying. There are intense crossword competitions between the sexes, communal PE from which only the grandparents are exempted, DIY entertainments when everyone either sings or dances or does magic tricks. This all makes what’s presumably a long weekend seem an endless one.
That pass-it-on transmission of the news that Dan has met a ‘hot’ girl is only the beginning. Members of the family are always turning up in ones or twos or en masse to interrupt private moments, not only Dan’s. When Marie, who’s as smitten with Dan as he is with her, can’t keep up the pretence with Mitch any longer and leaves the party, the whole family line up at the window to watch her departure and his rejection. Dan in Real Life badly needs a bit of acid and the oppressive team spirit of Dan’s folks could have supplied it – causing him not to practise what he preaches as a journalist, with a vengeance. The aggregation of familial insensitivity is formidable yet Hedges appears to see it as humorously endearing. Dan’s mother arranges a date for him with the daughter of another local family whom the Burnses remember as ‘pig face’. Dan protests and the others joke about what he’s in for. In one sense this rings true: laughing about how someone looks is the sort of thing, which when it’s part of family lore, puts a warm, sharing façade on the underlying cruelty. But if all the other Burnses are so lovingly aware that Dan needs to find someone new but is still emotionally raw, why do they josh him in this way? It seems unlikely that everyone but Dan is in on the secret that the porcine adolescent has grown up into Emily Blunt.
We get the sense that Dan’s over-solicitousness about his daughters is linked to the fear of losing them, as he lost his wife. His widowerhood isn’t developed interestingly, though: it’s designed for easy sentimentality and to testify to how nice Dan is – as if a nice person couldn’t be separated or divorced. But Steve Carell, as well as being a superb comedian, also has taste and sensitivity as an actor. His fine-tuned empathy with Dan rises above the essentially condescending conception of the character and his flair for physical humour elevates Dan’s niceness. Carell is physically just right for romantic comedy because his looks are both handsome and eccentric (the big nose helps with the latter). When Cara’s vaguely Hispanic boyfriend Marty (Felipe Dieppa) arrives at the gathering and Dan sends him away, Marty tells Dan (whose professional writing is full of aphorisms) that, ‘Love is not a feeling, it’s an ability’. (Marty says this in Spanish and translates.) A couple of minutes later Dan appropriates the adage: given how obvious this moment is, it’s a tall order to get an interesting delivery of the line but Carell manages it.
Casting Dane Cook as Mitch, however, is typical of Peter Hedges’s timidity. If Mitch had charm or charisma it would supply the situation with some tension but there’s nothing in this dull jock that you can believe would have drawn Marie to him. It’s much more believable that Mitch eventually pairs up with the pig-faced Ruth, who’s as stunningly boring as she’s stunningly pretty. (Emily Blunt has an amusing bit when Ruth gyrates around a jukebox.) As Marie, Juliette Binoche’s opening ditsy routine is excruciating and she’s irritating whenever she tries to act funny (or is self-consciously irresistible). When she’s quiet and plays simply, especially as Marie listens to the story of Dan’s life, she’s luminous. When she gets inside the comedy, as in the family workout, she’s funny too. It’s an unfailing pleasure to see Dianne Wiest and John Mahoney and both have some good moments as Dan’s parents, although Mahoney looks worryingly thin and the fact that even Wiest eventually struggles to redeem her lines (‘Love’s messy … you’ve made a lot of mistakes but Marie’s not one of them’) illustrates how ropy they are by this point. Dan’s sisters (I think they’re sisters) are played by Jessica Hecht and Amy Ryan; his eldest daughter by Alison Pill and his doe-eyed youngest by Marlene Lawston. The melodramatic Cara accuses her father at one stage of being ‘a murderer of love’. The way Brittany Robertson plays Cara, it’s a surprise that’s the only kind of murderer he is.
12 November 2010