Not quite Real Life

LITTLE ROCK — Dan in Real Life is a romantic comedy like one of Woody Allen's lesser tries, a pleasant enough little fling, better than most, mildly disappointing. Steve Carell is the nebbish, and Juliette Binoche ably subs for Diane Keaton as the poor guy's soul mate.

It kindles enough warm chuckles to be worth a night out. It's an absolutely safe date movie. A married couple could see it and it would make them feel like coffee and dessert afterward; the only reason to leave the kids home is that it wouldn't interest them. But it's far from Carell's comedic antics in The Forty-Year-Old Virgin.

There's no loss of chest hair, and in fact nothing as funny as the poster that shows Carell resting his dejected head on a pile of pancakes. The pancakes in the movie get eaten.

Dan in Real Life finds not only Carell but also comedian Dane Cook reaching for some tender heartstrings, and they actually plink some. The end is - fair warning - sniffly. But it's no surprise: Five minutes in, you know you're going to wind up with a honk.

Dan Burns (Carell) is a newspaper advice columnist. This alone scores major points with a newspaper reviewer. The time is long gone when movies showed newspaper guys as action heroes like Humphrey Bogart in Deadline U.S.A. (1952), the one where he says, "That's the press, baby. The press!" But it's nice to be shown at all.

The job allows sad-eyed widower Dan to stay home and make peanut-butter sandwiches for his three daughters. Jane (Alison Phil), the new driver, scores two out of five on the scale of movie-kid obnoxious, and lovestruck older sister Cara (Brittany Robertson) scores six. Little Lilly (Marlene Lawston) is wiser than Dad, of course, and adorable.

The setup is that Dan can tell other people how to solve their domestic problems, but he can'thandle his own. It seems likely this was the whole idea in some early version of the script. The premise invites all sorts of funny contrasts between Dan the sage advice-giver and Dan the bumbler in his own home. But that's not what happens.

Instead, Dan loads his bored and whiny crew into the family heap and heads off to a big family reunion at his parents' house. And it's here that Woody Allen seems to be whispering stage directions from just behind the warm wood paneling.

Dan's family is an Allen-like ensemble of terrific actors with not much to do, including Dianne Wiest as Dan's mom, who's as sweet as Mrs. Butterworth; and John Mahoney (of TV's Frasier) as the head of the clan.

Lonely in the crowd, Dan wanders off to a bookstore drenched in whimsy that also sells fishing tackle - and muffins - to bond over, in case he should meet the love of his life, which he does in Marie (Binoche). But relationships are like fishing lines, don't you know, full of snags.

The movie does something fresh with the idea of a reunion, though. It shows that people don't have to get into screaming fights for laughs just because it's a movie. They generally have a good time in the rumpled sprawl of a house where everybody knows your name, your flame, and most of your secrets.

The most beguiling thing about Dan in Real Life is that it feels like a real getaway among friends and family - one that doesn't last too long. About the time things start to feel suffocating, everybody, including the audience, gets to go home.

In real life, it would be the kind of get-together that results in a bunch of snapshots nobody can quite place by the time they're developed - pictures of good times already forgotten, but fairly good times all the same.