亲亲老爸 Dan In Real Life review by Ann Hornaday

There are some Steve Carell fans out there who believe the gifted comic actor has yet to make a superb feature comedy; they didn't see what the fuss was all about with "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," thought "Little Miss Sunshine" was not much more than an indie pastiche, and we won't even get into "Evan Almighty." So it looked like good news when Carell signed on with the equally gifted comic filmmaker Peter Hedges (who wrote "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" and "About a Boy" and directed "Pieces of April") to star in "Dan in Real Life."

Well, move along, folks: Nothing to see here. It turns out the title of "Dan in Real Life" is strictly ironic. There's nothing remotely real about this over-confected romantic comedy, in which Carell plays a newspaper advice columnist and single dad who falls in love with his brother's girlfriend during a weekend at the family beach house. Come to think of it, that house -- a magnificent shake-sided pile on Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay -- might be the only believable character in a movie in which the idea of resolving a scene is for everyone to engage in some adorable group activity, whether it's a crossword puzzle contest, charades, aerobics, a Kennedyesque game of touch football or, heaven help us, a too-cute-for-words talent show. (What, no potato-sack race?)

Ostensibly, "Dan in Real Life" is about how Dan and Marie (Juliette Binoche), who meet cute in a bookstore-cum-bait shop before she arrives at the reunion, figure out how to deal with their mutual attraction, even as she's supposed to be on the arm of Dan's genial but dim brother Mitch (Dane Cook). Of course, this particular problem isn't beyond the purview of mature adults: You smolder, you ponder, you temporize, it gets messy, you deal.

But these aren't mature adults, as Dan's overbearing parents (Dianne Wiest and John Mahoney) and gaggle of siblings and in-laws continually and gratingly demonstrate. Although Carell projects almost unquestionable appeal and Binoche radiates erotic, slightly daffy warmth, they seem constantly drowned out by the manic goings-on around them. While little subplots multiply in ever more cloying developments, Dan and Marie remain oddly passive figures within an emotional matrix that seems unfamiliar with the idea of privacy: People regularly barge into bathrooms for heart-to-hearts or descend en masse on Dan to tell him what's wrong with his life. (In related news, Dan is in the process of smothering his own three daughters, two of whom are teenagers and one of whom is the Hollywood-mandated precocious fourth- grader.)

As these characters helicopter above each other with whirring concern, we're clearly meant to see them as eccentric and charming, but there's something diseased about a grown man conducting a job interview with his parents in the room. Filmgoers haven't seen a family this neurotically enmeshed since Diane Keaton's last movie. (When Emily Blunt shows up as a character nervily named after the brilliant monologuist Ruth Draper, you mentally beg her to perform a catty intervention, but no such luck; she's scandalously underused.)

Between the casual air of aristocratic privilege and the constant thrum of forced cheer and compulsory competition, "Dan in Real Life" becomes a chore to sit through, not just because we're a Mad Lib away from wanting to strangle every last person on-screen, but because it fails to make good on a crucial narrative promise. Early on, a character congratulates Dan on a column about setting boundaries, which of course turns out to be wildly ironic. A truly happy ending, then, would be for Dan not only to get the girl but to tell his suffocating relatives to back off, then get his own life, real or otherwise. Instead, as the final scene suggests, they'll all be back next year, one big, insanely happy family. Potato sack, anyone?

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