May 12, 6:39 AM

Sad Dad

One of the really humbling things about aspiring to tell stories is the incontrovertible reality that most stories, even the ones that cost millions of dollars to make, are certifiably rank. Put them in your DVD player and you can smell them all the way across the house. Steve Carrel, who brings secular humanist business culture delightfully down around his ears in the Office, plays an advice columnist and widower-parent of three girls in the film Dan in Real Life--now out on DVD, and easily one of the most missable rentals of the year.

We are to understand, from the outset, that he is the very picture of devotion--setting out a course for his children every morning by asking about their "plan" for the day, and making all of their lunches, complete with honey-painted smiley faces on the sandwiches themselves. (The honey-smile will never be seen, of course, and this is the metaphor for the thousand acts of fatherly devotion his children will never acknowledge.) His extended family is the picture of New England gentry, complete with a shingle-sided home right on Narraganset bay. They are so gentry, in fact, that even the pig-faced girl across the harbor has grown up to be a dishy plastic surgeon, sporting a convertible. They are so gentry, in summary, they are completely beyond belief. The family scenes look like an Lands End catalogue with bad dialogue and unfelt laughter. The whole situation seems something like The Big Chill on Cheerios. The attempts to give this family a quirky, singular edge reveal themselves as desperate, implausible lunges at a reality the film never achieves. (Dianne Wiest, playing the matriarch of the clan, appears to put something like hiking boots in the laundry dryer every night, fully conscious that Dan is attempting to sleep in the same room, giving us an opportunity to extend a courtesy laugh to Steve Carrel's insomnia.)

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If these were the film's only flaws, it could be forgiven--like a burp at the dinner table, but the film breaks a primary rule of redemptive story-telling: Dan's three daughters, who are stock brats from the Hollywood brat character catalogue, not only never become ladies, they appear to be left blissfully unrepentant little wenches, cheering on their dad's submission to the romantic, impulsive myth.

When God was banished from right-thinking artistic culture, the only thing left was romance. The puppy-love mysticism of pursuing "the one" is the stock inventory of boring chick-flick after boring chick-flick. In the beginning of the film, Dan sensibly advises one of his vile, disobedient, disrespectful teenage daughters she can't really know if she's in love after three days. By the end of the film, Dan is made to see the wisdom of his daughter, the floozy, on this score, and opts for the French work-out waif, (Juliet Binoche) who is only happy when she's in a new country, new territory, and completely out of her element. (How long would this father of three find love in such a relationship? Inquiring minds want to know.)

Certainly, we can watch stories about stupid people who have stupid ideas, but there is a kind of cognitive dissonance that builds up when we have the sinking feeling that the narrator, the director, and the producer are all equally stupid.

Watching "Dan in Real Life" is something liking taking a really big bite out of the idiot cake and realizing, mid-gulp, that this is going to be really hard to swallow.

More of the Farm Journal -- May 11, 2008