Family man

Kids are the fount of wisdom in Dan in Real Life | Read Schuchardt

Dan in Real Life (rated PG-13 or some sexual innuendo, and language), a surprisingly enjoyable family film disguised as a romantic comedy, follows a sitcom formula. Yet within that structure, characters are given some room to become real. Dan (Steve Carell), a family-advice columnist who is also a widower with three girls, leaves suburban New Jersey and goes to a family reunion in seaside Rhode Island. While there he meets a woman (Juliette Binoche) in a bookstore who is, unbeknownst to him, dating his younger brother (Dane Cook). The usual collisions of awkward moments are touching, sometimes realistic, and often quite funny.

Try to recall the last time you saw a movie in which a family was represented as a group of loving, non-neurotic, heterosexual adults with mostly responsible, intelligent, and responsive children. Dan's family is so ideal, so unlike the families we get in modern media, that it feels delightful, impossible, and anachronistic all at once. Whatever else it does, their togetherness demands an explanation, because in the absence of a reason it seems downright abnormal in the modern context. Unfortunately, that reason never comes.