Sort Of Kind Of Mad About You | Actor/director Helen Hunt earns a basically favourable review for Then She Found Me.
THEN SHE FOUND ME
Directed by Helen Hunt. Starring Helen Hunt, Colin Firth, Bette Midler. Opens Fri, May 9.
2 1/2 stars
It’s a big risk for a first-time director to make a movie about mistakes. There’s just too much opportunity for your debut to become ironic in the extreme. But Helen Hunt has done a pretty decent job with Then She Found Me all the same.
Hunt plays April Epner, a 39-year-old elementary teacher in New York who desperately wants a baby. Unfortunately, her marriage to fellow teacher Ben (a pale and doughy Matthew Broderick) abruptly falls apart when he announces that he doesn’t want “this life” (whatever that is—we’ve only seen four minutes of it). He moves home with his mother after some spectacularly awkward breakup sex and leaves April to pick up the pieces.
Nine hours after Ben leaves her, April meets Frank (Colin Firth), the divorced father of one of her students, who gives her perplexing personal advice. Shortly thereafter, she’s informed that her long-lost biological mother Bernice (Bette Midler), a local TV star, wants to meet her.
It’s been a hell of a week.
But when she discovers that she’s pregnant (from the breakup booty, naturally), it certainly complicates her burgeoning relationships with Frank and Bernice.
Then She Found Me reminds us that family isn’t always blood kin, but it’s oddly lacking in emotion from the main character. Hunt’s performance as April seems distracted, her increasingly angular features more stone-faced than anguished. Part of the problem is that we’ve only known April with problems, so we don’t know if how she’s dealing with them is normal or not for her.
Hunt tries very hard as a director, but she makes a few missteps. The music in the first half of the film is frequently jarring; the silences are better. And the ending is a little predictable, but oh well.
Despite Hunt’s visual awkwardness as a director, she gets some good performances from her cast. I’d forgotten how much I like Bette Midler. She tells April about the night she was conceived: “He told me I had a perfect body and I was too inexperienced to know he was right.” Classic. Midler’s mixture of brassiness and maternal blunders comes across here—why isn’t she working more?
Colin Firth’s frustration and honesty makes me think that Firth is closer to Frank in real life than he is to Darcy. He’s got good reasons to be hurt by life, but he’s doing what he has to do to take care of his children. And as he confesses to April, he doesn’t even have to like it. He’s a real hero, the kind who forces himself to walk away instead of yelling, but then turns back when he remembers he can’t leave his kids alone in the house.
“Maybe God is complicated and difficult,” Bernice advises April, but despite the twists and turns, Then She Found Me remains a sincere, simple movie.
