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It must be an in-vogue quote, because more than one director has told me lately that romantic comedies "are not rocket science." One of them was Peter Hedges, director of the Steve Carell romcom Dan In Real Life.
What they mean is you-know-who are supposed to get together and you watch that happen. You also know who are wrong for each other, and correcting that usually represents the drama.
And when, as in Dan In Real Life, the "wrong" couple is the sublime Juliette Binoche and the egregiously unfunny space-filler Dane Cook, you just want to step onto the screen and talk sense into Juliette yourself and save everybody 90 minutes of impatient finger-tapping.
Dan In Real Life is a sweet, mildly quirky romcom from Hedges, whose indie cult hit Pieces Of April appealed to puppydog romantics of various stripes. Here he makes the jump to a studio movie with Steve Carell and Binoche as his vehicle.
What he ends up with is a family-friendly Disney film with essentially no drama (I don't think there's anybody onscreen or off who sees Cook and Binoche as a viable couple), but a load of charm, almost all of it provided by Carell who does the heavy lifting and shows he works best deadpan with subtle material.
In Dan In Real Life, Carell is Dan Burns, a newspaper advice columnist whose own life is on auto-pilot since the death of his wife. He has three daughters, every one of which is on his case with a meant-to-be-cute mean-spiritedness you'd think even teenagers might be incapable of. (His one infatuated daughter histrionically pronounces him a "murderer of love!" for interfering with her overheated teen love affair).
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The love-murder coincides with the Burns' annual seaside family reunion in New England. There, Dan falls immediately and awkwardly in love with Marie, a French woman he meets in a bookstore. It's a sweetly written, charmingly executed and vaguely familiar scene (in which Carell executes a full-Hugh Grant self-effacing salchow with an American axel).
However, once he arrives at Whataloadabunkport, or wherever this takes place, he's introduced to Marie all over again -- as the new girlfriend of his brother Mitch (Cook). The Burns family, by the way, is played by a lot of solid character actors, including Gone Baby Gone's Amy Ryan and, as the parents, John Mahoney and Dianne Wiest.
What follows is a lot of planned-fun of the sort you imagine the Kennedys have -- touch football games, talent nights, bowling, pancakes -- all of it unfolding as Dan and Marie try to deny their now-inappropriate attraction. He's frantic with fear of being found out, she's simply bemused (or something, Binoche, who never does Hollywood movies, doesn't really seem to be in this one most of the time either).
There are a few mildly antic moments involving pancakes, a shower and a cop. Every one of them is in the trailer, of course, which misleads audiences into thinking this is some Farrelly Brothers-lite project. Sweet and subtle just doesn't translate into trailer form.
Which is too bad, because there is an audience for Dan In Real Life, and unlike couples in romantic comedies, movies and audiences that are meant for each other don't always connect.
(This film is rated PG-13)