'Dan in Real Life' brims with sappy sentimentality

The posters for "Dan in Real Life" show Steve Carell blithely squashing his face into a stack of pancakes. This is false advertising, a marketing department's attempt to pass off a sensitive family drama as another wacky Steve Carell comedy. The guy sitting next to me seemed genuinely disappointed that Carell's face never did make contact with any form of breakfast food. But I found the poster to be a pretty apt summary of the film's effect: "Dan in Real Life" offers something potentially delicious, then mashes itself into your face until you're covered in syrupy sweetness.

Our hero is Dan Burns, an advice columnist for a local paper. Most professional advice dispensers tend to be hopeless fools (except, you know, film critics), and Dan is no exception. As a single dad raising three rebellious daughters, Dan is less a father than a warden; when he spies one of his progeny making out at a coffee shop, his first reaction is to bang on the window like an angry chimpanzee. This isn't your garden-variety overzealous parenting either -- a lonely widower, Dan lives in fear of either losing his daughters or worse, watching them grow up.

The film opens on Dan and his daughters preparing to set off for the annual Burns family reunion in Rhode Island. The Burns clan is one of those eerily perfect extended families that you can only find in the movies; everybody dresses in plaid flannel shirts and competes in synchronized crossword puzzle competitions. Dan's parents (John Mahoney and Dianne Wiest) are easy enough to keep track of, but he seems to have at least half a dozen siblings, and enough nephews and nieces to fill a large kindergarten.

It's a beatific family portrait, but kind of heartwarming too -- if the film had just settled its gaze on the Burns family and let the reunion play without embellishment, then "Dan in Real Life" might have succeeded as an unambitious caricature of domesticity. But trouble strikes when Dan goes out to get the paper and meets Marie (Juliette Binoche), a gorgeous Frenchwoman with tired eyes that practically scream "I'm looking to be swept away!" As a matter of fact, that's one of her first lines of dialogue, and Dan leaps to the challenge like a cocker spaniel in heat.

Everything's going swimmingly until Marie suddenly gets a call and dashes off to meet a mysterious boyfriend, leaving Dan in the dust. Dan drives home forlorn, only to encounter Marie 20 minutes later when she turns up in the arms of his brother Mitch (Dane Cook, surprisingly good). Mitch is a scruffy, well-meaning guy, thoroughly undeserving of Marie's affections but eager to prove his worth. He proudly introduces Marie to the family as a guest for the reunion, unaware that his brother has fallen in love with her that very afternoon.

If this is beginning to sound like a soap opera, that's because it is. The ensuing web of romantic intrigue -- Will Dan overcome his feelings for Marie? Or will she ever reciprocate? What on earth is Juliette Binoche doing with Dane Cook? -- feels awfully derivative, but the narrative is not without its moments of inspiration. My favorite bit was when Dan's mom sets him up on a blind date with a local girl inauspiciously named Ruthie Draper (Emily Blunt). Blunt has portrayed the year's most lovable prude in "The Jane Austen Book Club," but here she morphs into a wild-eyed sex goddess who leaps onto Steve Carell with nymphomaniacal verve. We're never quite sure if the date leads to copulation, but like most of the other characters, we're left too dumbstruck to care.

"Dan in Real Life" is directed by Peter Hedges, whose "Pieces of April" was a similarly quirky study of familial angst. Hedges has a refreshingly sedate visual sensibility -- he avoids frenetic cuts, and resists the temptation to fill the screen with Carell's rubbery visage -- but I wish to God that he hadn't decided to plunder the material for emotional exploitation. There are some genuinely touching scenes in "Dan in Real Life" (Dane Cook's heartfelt crooning in the family talent show nearly brought me to tears), but they drown in a soup of sentimentality. Dan's intermittently poignant narrative is weighed down by a host of contrivances: the adorable nine-year-old daughter who just wants to show him her art project, the high-school lothario who dispenses improbably wise epigrams, etc. In case we miss the point, Hedges treats us to fortune-cookie insights like "Love isn't a feeling. It's an ability." What the hell does that mean?

I despise the ending of this film, mostly because it abandons all pretense of reality in favor of a palatable resolution. In real life, romantic wounds like these don't just heal up one or two scenes later. In real life, secondary characters don't just show up out of nowhere for the convenience of the plot. In real life, bowling alleys don't come with mood lighting and make-out music.

All this and more suggests that, in spite of its title, "Dan in Real Life" bears very little resemblance to real life. And that's fine with me. But the imaginary world that Hedges creates instead -- a plaid-striped fantasy of calculated sentimentality -- is far less interesting than real life could ever be.