Then She Found Me

Kudos to Helen Hunt. Ten years ago she had the most popular sitcom on US TV (Mad About You) and won an Oscar for serving Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets. But after a little flurry of movies around the millennium (including Dr T and The Women and What Women Want) she seemed to shrink from view. There was A Good Woman, a small part in Emilio Estevez’s Bobby, and the TV movie Empire Falls, but that’s all we’ve seen of her in the last six years.

Now we know why. It’s no small to write and direct your first movie, and star in it too. Hunt (in collaboration with Alice Arlen and Victor Levin) has adapted Elinor Lipman’s novel about April, a 39-year-old New York school teacher with a ticking biological clock whose life goes topsy turvy when…

(a) her immature husband – played by Matthew Broderick – announces their marriage was a mistake and goes back to live with his mom

(b) her adoptive mother dies

(c) she is contacted for the first time by her biological mother, Bernice, a local TV talk show host, played by Bette Midler, no less

(d) she meets and begins a relationship with the single father of one of her school kids, Frank (Colin Firth).

There is, you can see, no shortage of emotional turmoil here, though Hunt is aiming for laughs too (the dread word “dramedy” is hard to resist in this instance).

To her credit, she steers well wide of the slick and superficial cosmetic chick flick territory staked out by Sex and the City and The Women. The mood is more low-key and naturalistic. Her own appearance is a case in point, unglamorous, rail thin, even gaunt. April is obviously smart and funny, but not in a quippy, writerly way – after all, for most of the movie she’s depressed, confused, and seriously pissed off. She makes bad choices sometimes (sleeping with her husband after the breakup would be one of them), and often she reverses herself and changes her mind – something we see more regularly in real life than on screen.

Colin Firth is equally good, even if he’s always playing this type of sensitive guy. What’s refreshing about this too convenient Mr Right is that he has his limits: two or three times his anger and frustration just explode out of him, and even though he’s justified, you step back and wonder if April is wise to put herself in the line of fire.

I have to say I was not entirely persuaded by the casting of Bette Midler. She can be a comic powerhouse, but her personality is so strong it tends to trample everyone else within a three-block radius. Of course that’s partly why Hunt cast her as Bernice, a minor celebrity with a major ego. And who wouldn’t be dismayed to meet your birth mother after nearly 40 years and find it’s Bette Midler? Even so, and despite what is for her a relatively subtle performance, Midler’s relentlessly upbeat broad struck me as too much to sit comfortably with the prevailing earnest angst. (Others may find her a welcome release.)

Hunt the filmmaker makes other mistakes too. The tone is sometimes uncertain and the staging can be stiff and self-conscious. Casting Salman Rushdie as April’s obstetrician may have seemed like a bit of fun at the time, but it’s a silly stunt that takes us out of the movie. And for all its raw hurt, the movie can’t resist manufacturing a fade out as sentimental as anything we see in The Women. Not that you begrudge April a little good fortune. She’s earned it.

Tom Charity
tom.charty@lovefilm.com