WHAT are we to do with Steve Carell? Since breaking cover with The 40-Year-Old Virgin and the American version of The Office, the middle-aged New Englander has rapidly become Hollywood's first choice when seeking a blank, bemused wage slave.
He has a likeable face and a good way with a self-pitying quip, but perhaps it's time he allowed some trickles of personality to leak through that deadened façade.
Dan in Real Life, a self-satisfied comedy from the director of Pieces of April, finds Carell taking on the role of a hard-working widower rendered faintly catatonic by lingering grief and the exhaustion that results from raising three children. So, Carell is, if anything, even less animated than he was in Evan Almighty and Little Miss Sunshine. This shtick really is wearing thin.
Mind you, such is the blandness all around him that Steve still emerges as the best thing in the picture. Dan in Real Life finds the hero, author of a nauseatingly folksy newspaper column, making his way to the coast for a big family reunion. This is the class of cinematic gathering - games of touch football by day, talent contests after supper, catering by Norman Rockwell - that, in its celebration of smug middle-class complacency, makes misanthropes of even the jolliest family guys.
On his first morning, Dan makes his way to a local book- shop in search of newspapers and plot devices. There he runs into the puzzlingly foreign Juliette Binoche and, after babbling about Emily Dickinson, the two exchange telephone numbers and take their separate paths. Some hours later, Steve's brother arrives with his new girlfriend. Sacrebleu! It is the woman from the store. Events rapidly wear this already thin premise to the point of threadbare transparency.
Dan in Real Life is, to be fair, easy on the eye and even easier on the brain. Binoche, not altogether unusually for a French actor, is better at being surly and shruggy than cute and adorable. John Mahoney and Dianne Wiest are reliably charming as the heads of the family, and the maritime scenery offers distractions from the inevitable drift towards the standard rom-com denouement.
You might hope that a film with indie pretentions would resist the temptation to close with its protagonist racing to be somewhere before something happens. You would hope in vain.
