'DAN in Real Life" is the anti-Ben Stiller comedy: There's humiliation aplenty but no mugging, no abuse to the crotch region, no straining to be outrageous. One character says she's looking for something "not necessarily hahaha laugh-out-loud funny, something human funny," and that's what we get.

The title is the name of an advice column written by a widowed dad (Steve Carell) with three hip daughters who goes to an autumn family gathering at a Rhode Island cabin. The widowed dad thing has been beaten into the grave (next week brings a John Cusack movie along the same lines), and so have a couple of other plotlines, but when pros are working the material, stale can be the new fresh. This is the finest romantic comedy of the fall. It's also the only good romantic comedy of the fall.

At the family retreat, Dan's eye-rolling kids and parents (Dianne Wiest, John Mahoney) reserve for him "the special room" - the laundry room. As Dan practices his empty stare, the dryer moans and coughs like a retirement community.

On a visit to a bookstore, he is mistaken for an employee and asked for recommendations from a chatty customer named Marie (Juliette Binoche), who will of course turn out to be the girlfriend of Dan's brother (Dane Cook), with much suffering on Dan's part to come.

The whole movie depends on making Dan and Marie's bookish flirtation plausible, charming and exciting enough to wake Dan out of a four-year stupor of loneliness, yet low-key enough for Marie to walk away thinking they can just be friends.

Once it lays the rails, the movie can coast for the next hour as Dan slow-cooks in his own frustration. While Marie charms a roomful of people, he goes to fetch dessert and looks like he's going to go all "Hostel Part II" on an apple pie; when he opens the freezer, he puts his head in it.
COOL..NOW I WANT TO GO SEE IT..MAYBE.