Steve Carell's slow-burning performance as a widowed husband with three fractious teens to succour is the chief pleasure of Peter Hedges's romantic comedy.

Dan in Real Life won't be such a success as The 40 Year Old Virgin or Little Miss Sunshine and it doesn't deserve to be. It's shrewd but neither funny enough nor romantic enough to amount to more than a slightly gooey portrait of American family life. But it has its moments.

Dan, a family advice columnist, takes his complaining brood off on holiday, to a timber house in Maine that it's difficult to believe they could afford.

There he meets Juliette Binoche's Marie in the local bookshop. The sparks fly, for Dan at least, but he later finds out that she is the new girlfriend of his brother Mitch (Dane Cook).

It looks as if all is lost but Hedges, who wrote and directed the more acerbic family drama Pieces of April, gives us an ending that brings poor Dan new hope.

The film, adorned by Dianne Wiest and John Mahoney as the grandparents, is not one of Binoche's more successful efforts; romantic comedy is not quite her metier. But Carell's sad-sack widower is real enough to provide reasonable entertainment.