Only the Lonely

Nor is he the cruel and embittered failed parent of Victorian literature, like Mr. Dombey in Dickens’s Dombey and Son, whose inability to love is a torture to his sole surviving child. No, our Sensitive Young Widower has loved and has lost, and the flawless nature of his marital bliss has made his suffering all the more acute. But that suffering is ennobling. It has toughened and humanized him. The SYW is sadder and wiser and vastly more mature than his peers whose wives have remained alive in spite of the fact that they would clearly be better men if they, too, were forced to watch their loved one die.

His greatness of soul is demonstrated by the sacrifices he is willing to make as a father to small children. For them he must wear a brave face and soldier on, despite a broken heart.

And of course, he is successful and attractive, demonstrates all the qualities a woman would like in a husband because he was once a wonderful husband–only he’s available through no fault of his own. That is why, over the course of the last half-century, there have been at least a dozen situation comedies on television featuring a Sensitive Young Widower (most notably My Three Sons, The Andy Griffith Show, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, and Full House, which ran in prime time for a combined total of 31 years). On screen, the Sensitive Young Widower has appeared in many guises, from Tom Hanks’s grieving architect in Sleepless in Seattle to Michael Douglas’s lonely resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in The American President to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s log-lugging He-Man in Commando.

The latest Sensitive Young Widower is the hero of Dan in Real Life, a soulful new movie that is half-terrific and half-silly. This makes it well worth your while, since it’s hard to find a movie that is even one-eighth terrific. Dan Burns, four years a widower, writes a Dear Abby column about being a parent for a New Jersey newspaper. As the movie begins, he is collecting his three daughters–ages 10, 14, and 17–for a weekend with his family in Rhode Island.

The touches that make Dan in Real Life terrific are present from the start. In Dan’s queen-sized bed, his late wife has been replaced by books and newspapers scattered about, the standard-issue refuse of a writer who sleeps alone. He is suffering from an insomnia that drives him, first, from bed to his computer to write, then to the laundry room in the basement of his nondescript bungalow. He makes peanut butter sandwiches for his girls, each with a different accompaniment–one with jelly, one with banana–and he still cuts off the crusts and cuts them into small pieces.

The 17-year-old is angry with him because Dan will not let her drive the car. The 14-year-old is enraged because Dan will not allow her to see her boyfriend. “You are a murderer!” she cries with crazed adolescent passion. “A murderer of love!” Only the 10-year-old loves him unconditionally, and he will disappoint her later on.

Mostly, though, Dan in Real Life is satisfying because of Steve Carell, who gives a wonderful and fully lived-in performance in the title role. His Dan is an uncommonly lovable character because, despite great charm and intelligence, he’s still a bit of a shlep–a second-tier writer with one unsuccessful novel to his name who is doing the best he can under difficult personal circumstances.

Those circumstances metastasize over the long weekend after he meets the woman of his dreams at a bookstore, only to discover that she is his beloved brother’s girlfriend. And this is where the movie turns silly. Dan and Marie (Juliette Binoche) decide to pretend they’ve never met, and so the script forces the innately dignified Dan into ludicrous and false situations that only take place in bad movie comedies–like climbing out a bathroom window and falling off the roof into some bushes.

Dan in Real Life offers one of those gauzy visions of family togetherness that includes the inevitable touch football game, an extraordinarily tiresome set-piece that should be ruled illegal in a codicil to the new Law of the Sea Treaty. And the entire audience would be well-advised to inject itself with insulin when the Burns family decides to put on a family talent show.

And yet, even here, Carell manages to turn something markedly phony into something remarkably true. Dan picks up a guitar for the first time since his wife’s death to support his brother serenading the woman they both love with Pete Townshend’s “Let My Love Open the Door”–and then, with voice breaking, sings the song’s second verse directly to Marie. It’s among the most touching scenes in recent memory, and it solidifies Carell’s surprising, but entirely deserved, standing as a major star.

Carell has not had the most unlikely career in recent showbiz history–the prize for that would have to go to Danny DeVito in our time and Jimmy Durante in an earlier era–but surely not even he believed, as little as three years ago, that he would rise so vertiginously from his comfortable perch as one of Jon Stewart’s fake correspondents on The Daily Show, and an occasional third-banana bit on the big screen, to simultaneous glory as the lead performer on the coruscating NBC sitcom The Office and film stardom.

It takes a consummate performer like Carell to find something new and credible in a character as cliché-riddled as the Sensitive Young Widower. As long as you’re watching him, Carell makes you forget Fred MacMurray and Andy Griffith and Bob Saget and for a moment, you might think Dan in Real Life is a classic. But in the cool air outside the theater it all comes rushing in on you, and you find yourself back to real life–for real this time.

John Podhoretz is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.