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BY MAGGIE SCOTT

Four years after his wife’s death, Dan Burns (Steve Carell) is still sleeping on half their double bed; with her half covered in stuff. “A good father, but a terrible dad,” he’s having trouble speaking the language of his pre- and post-pubescent daughters, even though he writes an advice column about parenting.

Dan in Real Life is not your typical story of love-is-lovelier-the-second-time-around-even-for-a-struggling-single-parent.

With sly humor always skirting the perimeter of empathically moving moments, director Peter Hedges shows a sure hand on the helm of this universally appealing story of Dan’s evolution from withdrawal from the world into delighted determination to move on with his life.

Over-protective, Dan indulges his youngest and keeps an easy-going thumb on his two rapidly maturing daughters; one of whom is in the middle of a cataclysmically passionate first love. Dad says real love isn’t possible after only three weeks.

Hoping for some bonding beyond the reach of Cara’s irrational teen environment, Dan packs her, Jane and Lilly (Brittany Robertson; Alison Pill; Marlene Lawston) off to his folks’ ocean-side place in Rhode Island for a family reunion. Feeling like a fifth wheel and a failure amid the disapproval of his daughters, the happy chaos of his married-with-children siblings and the sympathies of his contented parents, Dan takes off alone up the coast to hide his moping psyche in the local bookstore.

There, Cupid’s arrow strikes. In walks Marie (Juliette Binoche), a woman who makes Dan’s slyly peeping eyes widen in heart-flipping interest. Mistaking the lurking Dan in the store’s stacks for a clerk, she asks him to help her find something between the covers (as in, book covers) that will help her with the wildly fluctuating feelings connected to her new relationship.

After three hours, Dan is in love. He races home to tell his family that he’s met a girl, and “she’s really something.” Turns out, that something is the girlfriend of Dan’s brother, Mitch (Dane Cook). With jaw-dropping dismay, Dan tries to deal honorably with this supposedly spoken-for woman.

Through all the agonizing proximity to Marie’s tantalizing personality during family games of charades, touch football on the lawn and team cross-word puzzle competitions (girls against guys), Dan tries to keep his distance. Laughing at the absurdity one minute and almost crying about the ironic shame of it all the next, the secret lovers dance around each other and the beginning-to-suspect Burns clan.

Even Dan’s daughters can see what’s cooking; and his advancing state of craziness is about to seriously jeopardize his already compromised relationship with them. Although a love story like this doesn’t necessarily exist in real life, this thoroughly delightful work is really easy to fall for.

A Focus Features/Touchstone Pictures release, rated PG-13 for mild sexual content.
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