Years ago Steve Carell played a disarming, sincere but dysfunctional family member as a confused widower in Dan in Real Life. For this, he plays Cal, and his wife (Julianne Moore) wants to divorce him after over twenty-five years of marriage because she’s had an affair. And so the film opens with Cal hearing the news and jumping comically from the passenger’s seat of their car. With the same gift for confronting middle-age – and there seems to be a flood of these male driven over-forty crisis films – Carell slips into full blown out woe-is-me mode, bellying up to the bar every night, until Jacob (Ryan Gosling) decides to take him under his wing. Cal’s moaning interferes with Jake’s mojo for seducing women at a nearby banquet. Jacob tells Cal “We’re gonna find your manhood” that Cal apparently seems to have lost back in 1984. He proceeds to teach Cal his techniques…how to dress, sip a martini, use pickup lines, in essence…get laid.
And while it sounds like just a silly premise for a lot of laughs, the film has more depth, spirit and subplots going on. Cal’s thirteen year old son, Robbie(Jonah Bobo) has found the love of his life in the babysitter (Analeigh Tipton) who has a crush of her own on an older man. Hannah (Emma Stone) is a law students whose boyfriends lets her down, so she’s about to find the love of her life. There’s Cal’s own fling with the drunken school teacher (Marisa Tomei) and then there’s the guy at the office (Kevin Bacon) responsible for the marriage breakup. The Tootsie type ending culminates in the backyard with everybody in the midst of a hilarious fiasco, but more than the laughs… the film gets you in the heart. The best ones make you laugh and cry.
The film focuses on details…performances that jump off the screen, the words jump off the script (by Dsn Fogelman destined for an Oscar nomination) and the same goes for the Directing team of Glenn FIcarra and John Requa (I love you Phillip Morris). But at its heart the films real detail is the co-existence between love and pain. And the reason we do stupid things for crazy, stupid love. Four tiaras