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Steve Carell, arguably Hollywood's biggest ticket funnyman these days, seems to gravitate toward films where family comes first.

In last year's quirky cult hit, Little Miss Sunshine, he played a suicidal uncle in a family that was both highly dysfunctional and committed to family-first-no-matter-what unconditional love.

Carell and family in 'Evan Almighty'

More recently, he played the lead role in Evan Almighty, a modern-day Noah who adores his wife and sons but is pulled away by duties on his new job—and by this little side project of building an ark. In the end, the whole family pitches in to help in a series of feel-good mushy moments.

And now, Carell plays the title character in Dan in Real Life, a "grown-up" family film opening in theaters everywhere this Friday. It's a wonderfully human story about a widowed advice columnist left to raise three daughters.

At a recent press gathering in Los Angeles to promote the film, Carell said he was drawn to his character, Dan Burns, because he's "honest, caring, and really loves his family a lot."

Carell said he relished the chance to make a movie about a man's responsibilities to—and need for—his loved ones.

That's just what screenwriter Pierce Gardner, a committed family man himself, was aiming for. And though he's written one of the finest Hollywood movies of the year, Gardner is, well, about as un-Hollywood as it gets.

While a small group of reporters waits Carell, the Big Movie Star, to make his appearance, Gardner strolls into the room, grinning, toting a plus-size man purse, clad in sneakers and a pullover sweater that looks suspiciously not trendy.

He places a large, framed family photograph on the front table and immediately launches into a proud, glowing description of his wife, kids, and in-laws—leaving all of us to wonder how this guy could possibly work in a town notorious for its depravity and dearth of family values.

Carell and Juliet Binoche in 'Dan in Real Life'

Gardner quickly makes a few things apparent—like the fact that he actually doesn't work in Hollywood, that he lives and writes on the East Coast, that this is the first Hollywood screenplay he's written in years. But more than that, Gardner's very presence suggests that perhaps the movies aren't quite as anti-family as they're sometimes made out to be.

Noting that he favors movies "about human relationships, with a little bit more in the background," Gardner, working with Pieces of April director Peter Hedges, has crafted a wonderfully human story about a widowed advice columnist—Dan Burns, played by Carell—left to raise three daughters. Comedic turmoil that ensues when he packs up his girls for a weekend at his family's cabin, only to find himself falling in love with his brother's new girlfriend (Juliette Binoche).

It's one of the most delightfully positive portrayals of a caring, functional family in recent memory, with a large cast of talented Broadway actors bringing the Burns clan to life in vivid detail. In fact, it's such a close, loving, tight-knit family that, if anything, some will accuse it of being too good to be true.

Not so.

As Gardner points to each face in his family photo, he reveals that the film is indeed based on his own extended kin, on joyful experiences at his wife's family cabin in New England. It's just the kind of movie he's always wanted to make—a "family comedy" that, as he puts it, "connects to everybody." In fact, Gardner's passion in writing the script was to make a movie about family that he could actually take his family to see; thus, he notes that it was "so intentional" to avoid profanity and explicit sexual content in the movie. (It's rated PG-13 "for some innuendo," according to the MPAA.)

Of course, not everything in the film is modeled after real life. The big crab dinners and family talent shows may be real, but Gardner knows that even a family comedy needs some jeopardy; he even joked to his wife, "I'm going to kill you so I can fall in love with someone else." Seriously, though, Gardner changed his fictional family just a bit from the real thing, making his lead character a widower and adding a third daughter; he and his wife have two, but he didn't want the onscreen girls to too closely resemble his own.

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