Dan in Real Life

One could fill this entire space with the titles of films from which writer-director Peter Hedges nicks his story, but for the sake of expediency, we’ll narrow it down to a desert-island handful: Home for the Holidays, The Family Stone, Sleepless in Seattle, What About Bob?, and Hedges’s own excellent Thanksgiving-dinner- flavored Pieces of April. Add to this cinematic stew your own cast—Steve Carell as the widower with three young girls, Dane Cook as the brother, Juliette Binoche as the brother’s girlfriend, Dianne Wiest and John Mahoney as the parents, Emily Blunt as the blind date, and assorted other familiar faces posing as family members gathered in an idyllic oceanside spot—and the dots connect themselves. The charitable might view Dan in Real Life as a sort of spiritual sequel to The 40-Year-Old Virgin: Dan’s the little man Andy might have become had his One True Love abandoned him with three children to whom he can’t connect, because every time he looks at them he sees the remnants of his former life. Or it could just be that Dan in Real Life steals from that line in Virgin about Carell kinda looking like Luke Wilson, since here Carell is, after all, playing the Luke Wilson role from The Family Stone.