Dan in Real Life
Posted on March 10, 2008 at 6:00 pm
No one is better than Steve Carell at playing clenched. In “Dan in Real Life,” he plays a character so clenched he just about levitates off the ground. Dan is an advice columnist and a single parent. He cares for his three daughters. He provides warm and witty counsel to the lonely hearts who write in for help. But his own lonely heart feels like it has been on hold for four years, since his wife died. Dan is holding on to what he has left as hard as he can; a little too tightly, according to the two older daughters. He is not quite ready to let Jane (Alison Pill) drive. And he is not even close to ready to let 15-year-old Cara (Brittany Robertson) have a boyfriend, even one who calls him “sir.” It’s as if he lets go of them, if he lets go of anything, he might experience another devastating loss. So, he subsists on tight smiles and denial, tossing off a few gentle wisecracks to try to pretend to the girls and to himself that everything is just fine.
Charlie Bartlett (Anton Yelchin) has been kicked out of so many posh prep schools that the only thing left to try is the local public school. At first, he shows up wearing his prep school blazer and carrying an attaché case, but he soon learns — around the time that a Mohawk-haired bully gives him a swirly — that this is not the way to fit in. And it only takes him a little bit longer to discover that he has what it takes to become truly popular: the willingness to listen to kids and the access to a wide range of prescription psychotropic drugs.
This pea-brained vanity production does not have the energy to remember from one scene to the next what it is about or why it is on screen. It is attention-deficit film-making. Famous-for-being-famous Paris Hilton is not only the star, but also the producer of the film, and it seems to have been entirely generated by whatever she thought would be fun to do in front of a camera, with no thought whatsoever to the misery it would inflict on those who might watch it.