No, you’re not missing anything - the earliest contender for 'Most Meaningless Movie Title of the Year' takes on no more significance as the heading of the weekly parental advice column written by Steve Carell’s single dad.

Dan On Real Life might make sense, but it would still be a misnomer for a knowingly cute romcom which squishes its audience into the bosom of a family who make the Waltons look like the Corleones.

Every year the Burns clan congregate for a get-together at their parental home in coastal Rhode Island for wine, food, fun and song. They’re as close-knit as their chunky sweaters.

With his wife dying four years earlier, it gives Dan a chance to let someone else look after his three daughters: savvy 17-year-old Jane (Pill), moody mid-teen Cara (the admirably stroppy Brittany Robertson) and little cutie Lilly (Marlene Lawston, Flightplan's vanishing tot).

On the first morning, Dan nips out for a paper and winds up bonding over books with a rather lovely stranger, Marie (Binoche). He's smitten before his coffee’s cold.

But just as Dan announces that he's met the woman of his dreams, his brother Mitch (Cook) introduces his latest lady-love… Surpri-i-ise! (Well, Marie did say she was in a relationship. )

Despite a few moments of Meet The Parents-style pratfalling – almost certainly shoehorned in for the trailer - farce is kept to a minimum.

The focus here is more on warmth than wackiness, allowing Carell to ease off the comedy accelerator as the font of family advice who comes to realise that he's not very good at practising what he preaches.

His appeal is such that, even when he’s acting like a jerk, you can forgive him anything (other than Evan Almighty). Binoche is also totally at ease in what is an unusually frothy role for her. Alas, the rest of the cast have little to do.

As Dan’s parents, Dianne Wiest and John ‘father of Frasier’ Mahoney are required merely to nod sagely and send him on a date with local girl Ruthie ‘Pigface’ Draper.

Played by British beauty Emily Blunt, not only is she more Babe than Pigface, she’s at least fifteen years too young to have been Dan’s former schoolmate.

Eventually, the cosiness begins to grate – a situation not helped by dialogue ripe with the hum of Hallmark Channel cheesiness.

“Love is not a feeling, it’s an ability”, philosophises Cara’s boyfriend in Spanish. It’s cod profundidad con bumfluff but Dan laps it up like it’s the work of Keats. Eyes will roll.

As the author of ‘What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?’, writer-director Hedges knows how to tell a story about kith and kin without smothering it in goo. Life is safer and sweeter here, but it’s all a little... unreal.

Elliott Noble