As much as I roll my eyes at the generically ironic scenario -- he's an advice columnist, but his personal life is a mess!
-- I'm delighted by the effortlessly breezy humor of "Dan in Real Life." It breaks free from that lame set-up's confines to go deeper into the psyche of its central character. It's a smart movie with a deceptively simple premise. Dan (Steve Carell) is a New Jersey newspaper columnist and a widowed father of three daughters whom he loves and wants to keep young forever. He is the epitome of a Steve Carell character: hapless despite being successful, and upbeat despite being a loser. You get the sense he's just barely keeping his life together, that he's been just barely doing it for years -- and that he could keep just barely doing it indefinitely. He's got just-barely-coping down to a science. He and the girls go to Rhode Island for a weekend, an annual gathering of his parents, brothers, sisters, and their families. The clan is large, and I'm not sure I caught, in every case, which were Dan's siblings and which were his siblings' spouses. I kind of like the hecticness of it, though. The long take where Dan first arrives and greets everyone felt exactly like my visits home for Christmas, where aunts and uncles and cousins abound and you try to say hello to everyone without making a spectacle of yourself or interrupting the festivities already underway.
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