It looks real enough and not digital, but there's not a single exterior photo of it on the movie's official Web site. I'll save you the trouble: I tried to find out, but couldn't. But I got over the music and had a good enough time, although something tells me this is the kind of movie that will inspire countless queries from moviegoers asking me where that house is. The songs are on the movie's Web site, if you doubt me. Advice columnist Dan Burns (Steve Carell) is a widower with three daughters, whom he brings to his parents vacation house for a family get-together. In such a laid-back movie, they're in our face. They are too foregrounded and literal, either commenting on the action or expounding on associated topics. If the film has a flaw, and I'm afraid it does, it's the Sondre Lerche songs on the soundtrack. French but eloquent in English, she fills a place that Ingrid Bergman used to inhabit in the cinema: Able to be very serious, very sweet, very beautiful, she has the gravitas to make this story seem more important than a mere game of switching partners. Juliette Binoche also has much to do with the film's charm. Yes, there are some loud moments and big laughs, some of them involving the three girls, who seem to be enduring simultaneous hormonal yearnings, but Mahoney and Wiest keep a steady hand on the tiller, and the fireplaces and Arts & Crafts furniture exert a calming influence. That's why the movie's so soothingly pleasant. His plot this time is less fraught, maybe because enormous stakes are not involved Mitch and Marie are not desperately in love Dan and Marie hardly know each other, and social awkwardness is the most difficult hurdle between here and happiness. The movie's director and co-writer, Peter Hedges, made the overlooked little treasure "Pieces Of April," a 2003 Sundance hit, also about a Thanksgiving family reunion (which, oddly enough, also involved a family named Burns). ![]() ![]() Binoche is superb at looking upon her new man with the regret she'd feel for a puppy she can't adopt. Good thing it's big enough for lots of secret conversations on the move the fact that social rules forbid them to declare their growing love make Marie and Dan feel all the more like blurting it out. That's the setup, and the movie deals with how to fit all those conflicting emotions into the house. That evening, brother Mitch brings his girlfriend home and, yes, it's Marie. It's not love at first sight, but it's intrigue, approval and yearning. They begin one of those conversations that threatens to continue for a lifetime. ![]() Also on hand is Dan's brother Mitch ( Dane Cook).ĭan goes into town in the afternoon and runs into Marie ( Juliette Binoche) in a bookstore. Since Mahoney's big job is wearing an apron in the kitchen, it's hard to see him as a guy owning that kind of real estate. At Thanksgiving, he takes them all to Rhode Island, where his parents ( John Mahoney and Dianne Wiest) own a vast, rambling brown-shingled beach house you probably couldn't touch for $20 million. He's raising three girls on his own, two teenagers and a pre-teen, and he must be doing a good job because they treat him like a slightly slow brother. He plays Dan Burns, a newspaper advice columnist, whose wife died four years before.
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