We saw this over the weekend, and I have to admit that we were incredibly pleasantly surprised, since the "Steve Carell personality" on the Daily Show was sometimes amusing but more often dull, loud, and annoying. Here, he turns in a relatively subdued and human performance that is also very funny. It doesn't hurt to be acting opposite Juliette Binoche, I'm sure, and the three daughters were also well cast.
My relatively minor gripe is that I have a problem with films in which the tension is created by people not talking to one another. This can be overcome with superior scripting/acting/direction, but all too often I'm pissed because all the problems (and consequently the whole film) could have been avoided by the characters talking to one another, and we aren't given an adequate reason for /why/ they don't simply talk to one another. In Dan IRL, we do get "real" conversations between Carell and Binoche, but we don't really get a very good sense for why Carell initially won't talk to his family about meeting Binoche in the bookstore.
PS - As a bonus, this was the movie in which I realized that Dianne Wiest is actually the prototype for the Renee Zellweger "scrunchy face" style of acting, only somehow Wiest manages to carry it off.
