Nipple play: Steve Carell does his best to carry a movie with very little soul.

Pleasant Mill

Steve Carell’s latest is a bit too rosy for the real world.

by Sean Burns

At some point during this past summer’s megabomb Evan Almighty, I noticed that the overall experience was somehow slightly less painful than the awful script and garbage filmmaking should’ve demanded—probably because it’s just plain enjoyable to watch Carell right now. Contrasted with the airless, egomaniacal mugging of his predecessor in the Almighty series, Jim Carrey, here’s an actor who pays attention to his co-stars, actively listening in scenes and offering occasional grace notes to help us all get through the grueling experience together.

In other words, he’s pleasant. Even in crap.

Dan in Real Life isn’t crap, but it’s about as pleasant as a movie can get without actually being any good. The movie is so warm and cozy it might as well be wearing a big, fuzzy sweater.

Carell stars as Dan Burns, a sad-eyed widower who writes a newspaper column about raising his three young daughters. Dan packs up the kids and heads off for a family reunion weekend in Rhode Island, where the lovely foliage gets about as much screen time as the supporting characters. Everybody looks like they’ve wandered out of an LL Bean catalog, and Nana (Dianne Wiest) and Poppy (John Mahoney) dispense avuncular chestnuts of wisdom through crinkly knowing smiles.

But while dawdling around a bookstore one fateful morning, Dan instantly falls head over heels in love with Juliette Binoche’s Marie. As far as I can surmise, this occurs for one of two possible reasons: 1) She’s Juliette Binoche, dummy. 2) She listens, enraptured, as he talks about nothing but himself for several hours. (This sequence calls to mind the great hidden joke in Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown, when Sean Penn finally realizes his ideal woman is a mute. It’s also reminiscent of the movie Once, except in that one it’s not supposed to be funny.)

It’s a shame Dan never bothers asking Marie any questions, otherwise he’d figure out pretty quickly that she’s his brother Mitch’s new girlfriend, already on her way to that comfy Burns family compound to meet Dan and the rest of the gang.

As Mitch is played by the odious Dane Cook, we must first take a moment to face the prospect of a universe so cruel, godless and unfair that Juliette Binoche would willingly spend more than 40 seconds in the presence of a loutish, noisy MySpace comedian who tells other people’s jokes. After that, we sit back and wait for Dan and Marie to realize they’re made for each other, even if that means disrupting the happy family’s crossword puzzle contests, tag football games and elaborate talent shows.

I can’t help but feel many viewers will emerge somewhat perplexed after witnessing a multigenerational sibling get-together so activity-oriented, emotionally functional and regimentally structured. It all felt a bit creepy and Stepford-ish to these eyes. But then again, the suspicious absence of booze, televised sports, old Rolling Stones records and hollering made it all quite unlike any Burns family reunion I’ve ever witnessed.

We root for Carell even as he drifts through the movie in a minor key, basically reprising his Little Miss Sunshine performance. Director Peter Hedges (who co-wrote the script with Pierce Gardner) tends to keep Dan isolated in the foreground of the frame, with the rest of his kin bustling, sometimes out of focus, on a separate visual plane. It’s a directorial choice more emotionally evocative than this slim material can really handle, and would probably be better suited to some of Hedges’ tougher-minded previous screenplays, like What’s Eating Gilbert Grape or About a Boy.

Hedges’ highbrow cinematic lingo and Lawrence Sher’s burnished cinematography (again, that foliage!) lend Dan in Real Life a classier veneer than one would expect from such a slender sitcom premise. Ditto for the regal presence of Binoche, and the score by Norwegian singer Sondre Lerche.

But at the end of the day, the unwritten laws of Hollywood dictate that all films like this one must prominently feature either Pete Townsend’s “Let My Love Open the Door” or Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill.” Carell obliges by performing the former himself, on an acoustic guitar. How pleasant.

Dan in Real Life
C-
Director: Peter Hedges
Starring: Steve Carell, Juliette Binoche, Dane Cook
Opens Fri., Oct. 26