Dan in Real Life'

Release Date: 11th January 2008
Runtime: 98min 31secs
Tagline: Something's happening to Dan.
It's confusing. It's awkward. It's family.
Written and Directed by: Peter Hedges
Also written by: Pierce Gardner

Plot Outline:
Dan Burns (Steve Carell) is a devoted single father and a renowned newspaper advice columnist. When his entire extended family gets together for a reunion he unexpectedly meets Marie (Juliette Binoche), the woman of his dreams. She is smart, funny, beautiful and she just happens to be his brother's girlfriend! In this heartfelt new comedy, the man with all the answers finds that the hardest advice to take may be your own.

Overall Impressions:
Its concept is pretty generic, we've seen this sort of film upteen times, boy meets girl, girl has a boyfriend, boy goes ouch. Boy connivingly removes obstacle remains painfully in love until girl realises boy is the catch & not the current boyfriend. Spicing this up a bit, add a connection between the boy and current boyfriend. Aha .. brothers! Mockery aside, have you ever wondered why we've seen this concept upteen times? I'll skip the in-depth structural analysis of plot and say it plain out: "because it works!"

So we have a story that works, we have a bunch of talents, but there's still 100 odd things they could get wrong. I'm glad to report, this time is not one of those cases. When we have a story that has been tried and tested numerous times before, what is crucial for such a film to hold an impact, is a whiff of freshness and this is a stronger point of Dan. Focussing initially on the dysfunctional father angle and merely skimming over his career as someone who advises others thorugh his column, it hits off with a strong beginning. With only one of his 3 daughters who remains close to him, he becomes someone who you can empathise with straight away.

As they set off to an annual larger family gathering, we get to find out more about him, his extended family do love him and are happy to see him, but even they think he sucks. To quite an extent he trusts that his family knows him well, he too believes this. He's not wallowing in self-pity to the point where he irritates, but he's come to terms with the idea that he must try a lot harder than the average man to achieve the norm. Not that we had any doubts, but funny-man Steve Carell gives us an honest, normal person to relate to & it's at this point that the conflict hits home.

As he meets this girl who mistakes him for an employee at a book store, it doesn't feel like an awkward turn, which I feel it easily would have if it wasn't for the leadup to it and the way it's handled on-screen. Since the story is pretty straightforward and simple, I think I should leave going further about the plot by saying the film is worth seeing for the product as a whole. A well-grounded, well-written, all round well balanced flick.

An honest film - it entertains while tugging at your heartstring. In the heap of blockbusters flowing at the multiplexes, I can see this failing to hit people's radars which truly is a shame, I feel it really shouldn't.