Movie Review: ‘Then She Found Me’ isn’t new, but that’s not bad
By Alexandyr Kent
akent@gannett.com
Helen Hunt’s directorial debut arrives with a bit of expectation. She’s chosen to adapt a book, Elinor Lipman’s “Then She Found Me,” she’s known since 1990. Seven seasons of “Mad About You,” a selective movie career and an Oscar later, Hunt’s finally putting a personal passion to the test.
Though this movie comes in a conventional package – cinematically, there’s nothing unique about it – it delivers drama through mercurial characters, meaningful humor and uneasy plot twists.
Hunt stars as April Epner, a 39-year-old school teacher who yearns to have her first baby. Inconveniently, her husband (Matthew Broderick) doesn’t and leaves her after 10 months of trying. To make desires muddier, she meets and falls for Frank (Colin Firth), a dazed single father of two young kids who is fresh off a divorce. Making matters even worse are April’s adoptive mother (Lynn Cohen), who urges Epner to adopt, and her birth mother (Bette Midler), who shows up unexpectedly with a fishy “I need you now” song and dance.
When crises come, they pour for poor Epner.
Hunt takes a familiar approach to the role. She’s a bit mad, inching close to a nervous breakdown, and negotiating every decision as if it were a chess match with Fate. That it’s not new territory for Hunt is not bad, because she is quite good as playing sympathetic, fraught heroines.
What’s refreshing here are the equally broken and believable characters she’s surrounded by.
Broderick may play the husband with his trademark pathetic dignity, but he gives lines like “I don’t want this life” a sense of confessional courage. His honesty hurts her, but at least it’s honest.
Midler may be forever a pretender, but she’s cast perfectly as a nosey, self-interested talk show host. She approaches every new person she meets like an interview subject. “You’re sitting on anger. Hit hard. Ask me anything you want,” she says, and we don’t know whether to laugh or boo at the canned presumptuousness.
Mister D: Reporting Live from Niagara where it’s “Fall” all year round!
Shreveport Times
By Alexandyr Kent
6-13-08
And the brilliant Firth may go with the lonely, abandoned dad routine, but he injects his character with wit, fatherly exhaustion and interpersonal confusion. It’s too soon for him to have a new relationship, he knows, but he can’t help himself. And he can’t stop himself from projecting his anger about his ex onto Epner during a stinging verbal fight. His outburst is real and understandable, if a bit monstrous.
As a movie that aims to replicate the unpredictable rhythms of adulthood, “Then She Found Me” works. It’s a compassionate, often funny, sometimes sad look at failed marriages, the desire to be a mother and the awkwardness of mid-life courtship.
The movie never goes for cheap tears, yet it will move you if you let it.
