Rich in Real Life
One of our favorite movies is the 2007 RomCom with Steve Carrel, Juliet Binoche, and Dane Cook called Dan in Real Life. It is directed by Peter Hedges, who is a bit of an obscure director who is perhaps better known as a writer of What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio) and the screenplay for About a Boy, which is another favorite of mine. We are sitting around as usual tonight after we have given the girls their allotment of America’s Got Talent (AGT) and we need a movie that we can all enjoy. I’m always partial to a good WWII movie, but that never goes over well. Kim likes light-hearted things or else thrillers (go figure). I don’t really know what Carolyn and John are into except that last night Carolyn asked if we could watch the new HBO Max show, Edge of the World, which seems to be about extreme sports efforts. The first episode was called Into the Void and was about a team that climbed an obscure and difficult peak in coastal Alaska only to ski and snowboard down it after risking life and limb climbing it. I was pleased to accommodate her since I really enjoy shows about things like mountain climbing. As best I can tell, I am fascinated by people who take those types of risks and challenges because I would never dream of doing it. Mountain climbing has never been on my list, not even for a nanosecond. I skied for many years and was better at it than you might imagine, but extreme skiing was never in my bailiwick either.
I think what I like about Dan in Real Life is that it is very believable and very funny at the same time. There are 50 movies that have grossed more than $1 billion, so a movie that grossed $65 million has hardly made a ripple in the cinematic world. But it is a movie I have seen over a dozen times and would watch any time it was available or someone else wanted to watch it. In that regard it is not unlike my favorite movie of all time, Moonstruck, that only grossed a little more than Dan in Real Life at $80 million. I’m not sure that financial success is a measure I care much about with movies. That list of the top fifty are almost all either action films (like from the comic books) or cartoon movies either from Disney or Pixar. I understand and appreciate their success, but that has little to do with how much I enjoy the movies and especially how much it makes me want to watch it over and over again. Generally that means that there is something in the movie that touches my soul in some way.
Dan is a regular guy who lives in New Jersey and is a parenting help column writer for a local paper and is also a widower with three girls who are growing up quickly in his midst. The movie follows a family gathering trip to Rhode Island that the group takes to join various brothers and sisters with their significant others at the shorefront home of their parents, played perfectly by Dianne Wiest and John Mahoney (Frasier’s dad). The Rom part of the RomCom comes into play because Dan falls for a woman (Binoche) he just happens to meet, only to find that she is the girlfriend of his brother (Cook). The following scenes follow with lots of humor as he tries hard and fails to avoid falling in love with her. The Deus ex Machina of the tryst is played by Emily Blunt who is affectionately known by the family as Ruthie “Pigface” Draper. She is set up with Dan and ends up with Cook in a series of events spanning the three days of the gathering. The general theme of the movie is love and how it can happen as easily and as quickly as three days will allow. It is also made clear that love is more than a feeling, it is an ability and that notion itself takes on an almost credo status among the family.
This small and relatively insignificant film has a great cast that is wonderfully directed by Hedges, making me wish he had been tasked to direct other movies for which his subtle touch might have made memorable. In many ways, his screenplay for About a Boy shows me that he is more than a one-hit wonder and that he is possessed of a unique sensibility for modern family life and in bringing out the quirkiness of love in unusual situations. When I think of my all-time favorite RomCom, Moonstruck, it has many of the same elements and directorial touch, but Norman Jewison, who directed it is somewhat more accomplished than Hedges and seemed to have a broader skillset that extended beyond comedy to more serious movies like Agnes of God and In the Heat of the Night, both great films, but neither claiming anything humorous.
This all made me stop and think about love in the context of real life. I think if I wanted to I could write several RomComs about my love life over the past fifty years. I know that we are not supposed to laugh at others, but laughing at ourselves is not only allowed, but encouraged. Unfortunately, love is rarely a solo event and any writing about the foibles of love inevitably involve others who may not be as willing to find humor in their own lives. There are poignant and funny bits imbedded in all of our lives and it probably just takes an observant and skilled writer or maybe director to bring those to the fore to be enjoyable to a broader audience. I’m guessing that since these movies that I enjoy so much have only had limited box office appeal, that not everyone shares my sense of humor or my desire to explore and exploits the frailties of life that makes our love lives so entertaining if looked at objectively. As a natural born storyteller, I perhaps appreciate this aspect more than others.
That now makes me wonder why I am so willing to share my experiences and lay them out there for the world to see and poke at either in fun or perhaps sometimes in approbation. I see us all as flawed beings, myself no more or less than anyone else. In fact, I think that the act and willingness to share and invite critique actually makes me a better person because it keeps me more humble than I might otherwise be. It is very easy for me to say that I have married three beautiful women and dated several other beautiful women, and while that might be true in an objective sense, it would belie the reality of the stumbling process by which all of that occurred. It is the stumbling that makes the real story because the rest is all superficiality. It means nothing who I have loved or tried to love, but it means everything about how that unfolded and how it was received and interpreted. There is also the part about who might have loved me for which I may have been oblivious.
I can think of one instance when a young intern at my bank confessed that she had a crush on me for one reason or another. It had gone completely unnoticed by me, mostly because I don’t tend to think of myself as someone who others might crush upon. I was made aware of this instance for HR reasons and to avoid any semblance of impropriety, but I would have otherwise gone through life not knowing any of it. That is what makes love such an interesting topic for stories and movies. It is at once expected and unexpected, sought and avoided, desired and shunned, and engaged and evaded. It can be bilateral, unilateral and multilateral and sometimes morph between the three. It can be immediate and evolutionary. There is a reason why love is the number one topic of songs, poems and stories (including movies). It is literally what makes the world go around and it is the basis for real life in us all.