Friday Movies: Dan in Real Life
My choices yesterday – since I wanted to stay in the neighborhood, so that I could have lunch at the museum afterward and take a look at some of the new shows that have opened this Fall – were American Gangster and Dan in Real Life. I chose the latter, because American Gangster was berated by everyone save (predictably) the Wall Street Journal for its faulty moral compass. Well, the same might be said of Dan in Real Life, although I’m probably going to be the only one to say it. Dan in Real Life is obviously about a family of professional-class people, but all explicit references to such a background have been effaced, presumably in the interest of making more proletarian audiences feel at home with the comedy.  The class neutrality of Dan in Real Life amounts to the outright denial of intelligence as a virtue, and I found it both irritating and offensive. Â
¶ Dan in Real Life.
