Dane Cook Nearly Spoils Another Movie

Let’s get one thing straight: Dan in Real Life is a better movie than it has any right to be based on its trailers, tagline (“Something is happening to Dan. It’s confusing. It’s awkward. It’s family.”), and the casting of Dane Cook.

The movie stars Steve Carell as Dan Burns, an advice columnist whose wife died four years before the movie begins, leaving him to raise three daughters by himself. Dan and his litter go to spend a week at his parents’ house in Rhode Island for an unspecified occasion, along with about a million extended family members. While browsing through a bookstore in town, Dan meets Marie (Juliet Binoche), and sparks immediately fly. They bond over the unusual stack of books Dan recommends for her, which include everything from The Life of Gandhi and Anna Karenina to Everyone Poops—“It’s funny and true,” as Dan says. Because this is a movie, though, there’s a catch: Marie is dating Dan’s brother Mitch (Cook).

This plot summary would seem to portend a film full of slapstick sitcommery crossed with torrid melodrama, and to some extent, that’s what Dan in Real Life delivers. On the whole, though, director-slash-co-writer Peter Hedges, known for unconventional comedies like About a Boy and Pieces of April, employs a light touch that keeps his movie from veering too close to an episode of Full House.

Binoche and Carell are also perfectly cast—she is winningly endearing and he gives an understated performance that should make up for the bloated excess of this summer’s Evan Almighty. If Dan in Real Life simply consisted of Carell and Binoche charmingly falling in love against the picturesque background of New England in the fall, it would be a triumph.

Unfortunately, the film is also cluttered with an excess of wacky family members and contrived misunderstandings. There is far too much emphasis on an unfunny subplot involving Dan’s bitchy daughter Cara (Brittany Robertson), who is the kind of girl who wears sweatpants that have the phrase “You Wish” written across the seat, and her “love” for a young Wilmer Valderrama look-alike named Marty. Cara spends most of her scenes berating Dan because he has separated her from her beloved, screeching things like, “You are a murderer of love!”

Dan’s other family members are also almost uniformly and bafflingly nasty to him, which is especially strange considering just how tightly knit the Burns clan seems to be. The family activities that Dan’s relatives engage in over the course of the week range from the believable to the ridiculous. A large-scale game of hide and seek? Fine. But family crossword puzzle solving, morning aerobics, and even a talent show? Is there a family in America that could actually stomach this much togetherness?

And then there’s Dane Cook. While most reviewers have been notably kind to him—the New York Times calls him “astonishingly tolerable”—it seems worth mentioning that the puerile comedian doesn’t appear to be acting very much. Mitch’s speech is peppered with the same “dudes” and “bros” that Cook utilizes so often in his stand-up, and he regales his family with the tale of how he wooed Marie by saying, “When I first met her, I thought I had died because there was an angel in the room”—Cook himself probably wouldn’t be averse to using a pickup line like that. There’s a great little movie within Dan in Real Life that comes out whenever Carell and Binoche are alone—it’s just too bad that they have to share the screen with other people.