Dan in Real Life

Early in Peter Hedges’s “Dan in Real Life,” the title character, at a bookstore, meets the woman he will fall in love with. Mistaking him for an employee, she breathlessly tries to describe the kind of book she’s looking for. (He responds by gathering up a random assortment of volumes that includes the poems of Emily Dickinson, “Anna Karenina” and “Everybody Poops.”) “I want something funny,” she says. “But not laugh-out-loud funny. And definitely not making-fun-of-people funny. I want something human funny.” It does not take long to recognize this as a declaration of the film’s own intentions. Its moral is “expect to be surprised,” and the surprise is how frequently it succeeds. “Dan in Real Life” is neither wildly farcical nor mockingly cruel, but rather, for the most part, winningly gentle and observant. (official distributor synopsis)