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Author:
Grace McKeaney
Writer, producer of plays, television, cable movies etc. and receipient of all sorts of acknowledgements, but most significantly, she is the mother of two beloved daughters, Kate Deirdre and Hannah Guinevere.
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Grace McKeaney is a graduate of Northwestern University and attended the Yale School Of Drama for an MFA in playwriting. A recipient of Le Conte Du Nuoy Prize for contribution to the American Theater, she is the author of ten nationally produced plays and has developed new works at both the Eugene O’Neill Conference and the Sundance Institute. A veteran of television, she has written and produced shows (for all networks and many cables) as varied as “Roseanne”, “St Elsewhere”, “The Client”, “The Hoop Life” and “The Education Of Max Bickford”. She has written movies for Lifetime, Wonderful World Of Disney and Hallmark Hall Of Fame, including “Grace and Glorie” with Gena Rowlands and Diane Lane, (winner of a Christopher Award). Grace has taught creative writing at all levels, initiating the WORD PLAY program at Baltimore’s Center Stage which took professional writers into Maryland public schools. She is the author of two (as yet) unproduced screenplays. Most significant, she is the mother of two beloved daughters, Kate Deirdre and Hannah Guinevere.
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REAL LIFE IN HOLLYWOOD. IMAGINE THE POSSIBILITIES...
In DAN IN REAL LIFE, Steve Carell must make the thorny decision informing every single-parent’s waking: do I get out of bed today?
That he DOES, seizing the day, which has not yet officially dawned, will come as no real surprise to working mothers.
It’s how many of us start every day: reaching to the spot on the bed where the work has been left from the night before.... a soft space (maybe) once occupied by a helpmate, empty now. Registering you are alone. Then jumping up to do what you can. The best you can. Again.
Another day in real life.
It would take a whole article to examine the faceted creations, which are the female characters in DAN IN REAL LIFE.
But suffice it to say DAN will resonate deeply with women. I’m tempted to say it will resonate with anyone who has a pulse but with the twisty contemporary nature of movies driven by successful advertising, ya never know if the campaign will get out the vote.
For example: The DAN IN REAL LIFE advertised in the movie trailers I've seen is NOT really as good a movie as the DAN IN REAL LIFE which is in theaters.
How good is DAN IN REAL LIFE, really?
(Have I said DAN IN REAL LIFE enough? I don't feel I have.)
Okay, once more: You, folding the leggings: drop everything. You, writing up the real estate offer, saving the planet or rescuing your boss from embarrassment over his missed luncheon: It can wait. Go see DAN IN REAL LIFE. NOW. Do it for you.
That’s how good it is.
From the film’s quietly insightful opening salvo to the final stepping off the treadmill, Peter Hedges has co-written and artfully directed a carefully calibrated, deeply celebratory and exceedingly life affirming film about decent, loving, good hearted, interesting and humorously
triumphant people. I’m tempted to say everyday people. But how?
Interesting everyday people? Whose lives are funny and heartbreaking?
Yes, and he seems to say they’re everywhere, once you start looking for the good in people...
Dan Burns (Steve Carell), a widower with three daughters, evidences that most
forgivable of human frailties: over-involved parenting.
When you’re “it” for a family and God didn’t put enough hours in the day to get "it" done, you just start earlier. And often, sometimes...okay, usually...you crowd and even annoy everybody else.
Newspaperman Dan writes a parenting column that doesn’t help
the “ad hoc” family expert recognize or address his own growing personal
needs for affection, warmth and companionship. It takes a family full
of people who are interested in him to do that: getting him on the
right track during a bayside family reunion by telling him his kids
need space. He needs to start thinking about himself. Put another way:
He should get lost...
He doesn’t stray further than the dockside local bookstore (named adroitly and fore tellingly BOOK, LINE AND SINKER) where he meets Marie, an earthbound angel in the form of the dazzlingly well-cast, deftly directed Juliette Binoche.
The rest, as they say, is the stuff of comedy: in this case, the very
best comedy of 2007. For Marie, unbeknownst to the smitten doe-eyed Dan, is attending his family reunion on the arm of her newly minted boyfriend, Dan’s
younger brother Mitch (the sweetly understated, no brain-trust, Dane Cook).
Meeting the family for the first time, Marie has escaped for a little
personal space only to be keenly swept up by Dan, the real guy she belongs with... Unconsciously we know they are cut from the same book
jacket, fated. But it will be our comic delight that they be kept
apart for the rest of the movie, as each struggles to do and to
know, what’s right in this complex, funny and touching situation.
A human comedy about two decent people struggling with matters of heart
and conscience? That isn't Hollywood paint-by-numbers but TRULY funny? At a Rhode Island beach house? In one of those big-pawed litters of a family I lost in the last divorce?? Break me off a few more pieces of that!
Like any farce-like plot, this one would be cinema death in the grip of the ham-fisted and emotionally tone deaf. But (to echo the metaphor of the family football game enjoyed mid-picture) Peter Hedges has the playfulness of a true team player and the hands and heart of an emotionally gifted quarterback. In lob after lob, he gets those hard-to-get-right human moments right through the "true funny" goal posts. The ones that defy those directors working from formulaic, untruthful, unloving scripts. Probably because Hedges doesn’t think of moments as comedy. He just gets ‘em real. And the comedy follows. Respect and love your actors, respect and love your characters and the story telling will evolve with athleticism, grace, and deep investment by an audience. What shines on screen through his direction is what moves through Chekhov: the inestimable power of love.
Aided by a brilliant and uniformly well-served cast, Hedges has his secret weapon in Carell who turns into a leading man in DAN IN REAL LIFE, a place I hope he remains for many years to come.
Having moved into our living rooms with his side-splitting work on
THE OFFICE, having proved with FORTY YEAR OLD VIRGIN he’s a box office busting draw, in DAN IN REAL LIFE, an actor with authentic chops is born.
Heir select to the subtle everyman comedy of Bob Newhart, Carell, like Tom Hanks and Jack Lemmon in careers before him, shows us here comedy’s true path to the soul.
With the sad eyes of the clown, his every move potentially
funny, Carell exhibits the restraint of a storyteller. With good sense and insight, he informs each simple but complex choice with reality. Deciding not to pursue a conversation with his youngest daughter regarding her thong.
Accepting being misunderstood when he won't let his older daughter drive.
His performance is that hardest of things: "generously" true -- the way it is when a skilled craftsman lets the drama happen inside an audience rather than having all the fun or the feeling himself. As hampered by all manner of misguided inauthenticity as he was in EVAN ALMIGHTY (reviewed here earlier), here Carell takes full wing as the dimensional Dan Burns. If he weren't already a star I could say it's a star making turn. But it's more: it's an indication of acting wonders to come...
With as many things as can go wrong, a movie working this well may be a miracle. For the sake of argument, let's assume it's repeatable and look at what it takes.
First: get a funny, feeling script right on the page. Then realize the humanity of it onscreen with near perfect human pitch. In casting. In directing. Most importantly: don't feel you have to quirk up the characters. Hedges knows we're funniest when we are busy being ourselves. Better, he trusts that. Fully.
In always-human story choices, he steers cast and fictional family through the interesting shoals of CHARACTER with a common enough tool (though too often missing from the toolboxes of other directors): an abiding rudder of decency.
How refreshing to see people behaving well toward each other. What a feeling of personal and artistic well-being one feels laughing at, caring about accurately observed moments of life. Those "European" moments routinely run over
(Rough-shod) by 90% of the comedies that come out of Hollywood...Because like the orphan child, few in power love (or recognize) the "real" for what it truly is: the key to an audience's understanding of itself through it’s collective reasoning and it's warmed heart.
As shown as author of WHAT’S EATING GILBERT GRAPE and in his helming and writing of the amazing PIECES OF APRIL, Hedges has the full Britannica of colorful human dysfunction at his beck. That he chose, in collaborating on Pierce Gardner’s terrifically observed screenplay, to focus on a good, ordinary man in a troubled moment trying to make the right decision with the help of his family is nothing short of revolutionary.
That he succeeds is cause for standing on one's chair.
Peter O'Toole echoed the truth in MY FAVORITE YEAR, recalling the renowned actor Edmund Kean upon dying: "Dying is easy — comedy is hard."
As Hollywood goes, it’s more like "Spending is easy, living is hard." Living characters...Living stories...Real lives up there on the screen to invest in, be touched and delighted by...
But today is a new day. Go see. They gave Peter Hedges 25 million and he knew exactly what it could buy. Don't take my word for it. Get out and vote with your feet. Remember: if it's possible once, it's possible twice. If they know the key to our hearts is also the key to our wallets, maybe the revolution is now. If we won't settle for less than human in our comedies, if we won't pay for less, maybe they'll listen.
For today, at least, All's Well In Hollywood: With DAN IN REAL LIFE an "obscene" amount of money has been utterly well spent.
Cast
Steve Carell Dan Burns
Juliette Binoche Marie
Dane Cook Mitch Burns
Dianne Wiest Nana
Emily Blunt Ruthie Draper
John Mahoney Poppy Burns
Alison Pill Jane Burns
Brittany Robertson Cara Burns
Marlene Lawston Lilly Burns
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