Dan (Steve Carell) is a widower with three daughters. When Dan goes to a local bookstore, he meets Marie (Juliette Binoche) and they fall for each other. However, Dan is in for a surprise when he finds out that Marie is his brother's new girlfriend. Over the course of several days, the two go back and forth in forbidden love and a few laughs trying to fool the entire family. How would Dan choose? His brother, family or love?

Meet Dan Burns (Steve Carell) - a widower and single father who's raising three daughters on his own after his late wife's passing. Dan is a well-known advice columnist (a la Aunt Agony) who heals wounded hearts and provides answer to the miserably lost. But the best thing about Dan is that he is every parent, every husband, every brother, every son and every man. Perhaps there is a Dan in all of us.

The death of a loved one affects us all. For Dan, juggling his blooming career as a columnist and being the best everything for his family is all he wants, although underneath he knows he's as clueless as the next guy. Deep down, his heart was broken and his life has been bottled up with lonely. But of course, life is ever so full of surprises.

Imagine yourself meeting someone for the first time. You catch their gaze, exchange greetings, laugh over a few jokes, make charming comments about each other and then spend the next couple of hours sharing your life with that person. You suddenly feel an excited sort of careless, and the next you know you're fumbling with your words to make an impression on a person you have just known. At the end of it, they leave - perhaps forever - and you're left with lonely as your company again. Do you believe in a love so brief?

The practical and down-to-earth Dan experiences that very feeling after meeting Marie (Juliette Binoche) in a rustic bookstore in his hometown that he begins to contradict his every principle, belief, and more importantly, his own advice to his passionately (in love) dramatic teenage daughter Cara (Brittany Robertson) - that love don't happen within days. But the fleeting situation is made worse when Dan finds that Marie is really his brother Mitch's new girlfriend, whom Mitch had brought home to meet the family. Binoche is marvelously charming as the carefree Marie and her delightful spirit still manages to capture hearts although her performance is not as effective as it could have been. Perhaps someone more youthful and zesty could make us root for Marie.

Set upon the backdrop of chilly and leafy Rhode Island, the film is beautifully represented by its engagement with the story's heart-warming ingredients. Carell managed to put soul into his character, and the result is a wonderfully ordinary man dealing with matters of the heart, as well as family, without the "Evan Almighty" aftertaste. He is quick-witted and at the same time awkward, which rings close to a lot of the men we know.

Dan's rather large and perky family (Jack Mahoney and Dianne West play his parents) make him all the more relatable, and his daughters embody little bits and pieces of the answers he's looking for, if only he looked more closely. The story seem confined to the family's weekend home but with such a large family, it adds an element of sentimentality to an already family-driven comedy, and the warm music will sway you across a surprise that awakened one man's heart, telling you "everything's going to be okay".