Helen Hunt shows flair for melodramatic

Directorial debut a crowd-pleasing character study

Jay Stone, Canwest News Service

Friday, May 09, 2008

Then She Found Me

Starring Helen Hunt and Colin Firth.

Directed by Helen Hunt

Rating 3 1/2 out of five

April Epner is a nice Jewish schoolteacher having a terrible week. First, her chubby, whiny husband Ben (Matthew Broderick, who does chubby, whiny as an art form, although not one you’d want to perfect) announces that he wants to leave her.

Then her adoptive mother dies, but not before reminding April that, at 391/2 years old, it may be too late to have the child she always wanted and maybe she should think of adoption herself (“In China, they’re throwing them into trash cans.”).

Then she finds her birth mother and it’s Bette Midler. Then Frank, the father of one of her pupils, seems to be making a pass at her.

Well, maybe it’s not as bad as all that. Frank is played by Colin Firth, creating a memorably discombobulated character — a single father barely making do after his wife left him — who is at once charming, distracted, eager, mad and funny.

“It was traumatic and potentially illuminating to have met you,” he tells April after their stumbling first meeting, which sounds very much like love at first sight.

This collection of disasters, hard to accept at first, are cobbled together — awkwardly but sweetly — in Then She Found Me, a raggedy romantic comedy-cum-drama that is the first movie directed by Helen Hunt. She has a delicate touch: you can see it in the way she frames April, her heroine, as a worn, weary and lovely woman who’s edging into middle age with sharp features and a sharp sense for new humiliations to come. April, as it happens, is played by Helen Hunt, and if she seems to get a generous amount of screen time from the director, at least she’s just as confused as anyone.

Based on a novel by Elinor Lipman, Then She Found Me is a small film that had a long gestation period — it was initially supposed to be a Sigourney Weaver project — and comes to the screen looking scaled down and much the better for it, a scrawny little movie at once endearing and improbable.

Hunt is a performer without fussiness (April is a cousin of her waitress character in As Good As It Gets; call this one As Bad As It Gets), Midler tones down her brassy Broadway persona (although she still looks very much like Milton Berle in drag) and Firth manufactures a memorable love interest out of several bits and pieces, mostly exasperation, insecurity and confusion. His changes of tone are like a metaphor for the many colours of the movie itself, which never finds firm footing but plows ahead anyway, daring us to not be captivated.

The ups and downs revolve around the several stories being told at once. April’s reunion with Bernice (Midler), who turns out to be a semi-famous TV personality, is an odd couple clash of personalities and acting styles with some low-key getting-to-know-you talks (Bernice: “I’m very verbal during sex.” April: “I’m afraid of drowning.” Bernice: “During sex?” April: “No, just in general.”)

April’s desire to have a child becomes a quick tour through Hollywood’s latest obsession, pregnancy and adoption, spiced up with the casting of Salman Rushdie as an obstetrician (Then She Found Me is a low-budget affair, but some celebrity appearances remind you that it was made by an Oscar-winner).

The people in Then She Found Me are a mixture of good and bad, and their confrontations are often not solved well, or even at all. Broderick is allowed to be immature. Firth is allowed to be angry. Hunt shows her wrinkles. Midler doesn’t sing.

The movie got a special screening at last fall’s Toronto film festival, before it had a distributor, and it got a standing ovation. You can see why: it’s melodrama, but it’s likable melodrama, a crowd-pleasing foray into the minefield of female middle age that’s not afraid of a few bad decisions and even the odd explosion.

You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll wonder where all the men like Colin Firth have been hiding.

© The Calgary Herald 2008

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