May 9, 2008 | In Then She Found Me, her smart, subtle and seriously funny debut effort as a feature film director, Oscar-winning actress Helen Hunt offers an ensemble of vividly drawn, full-bodied characters who often surprise us. And it is very much to Hunt’s credit that some of those surprises aren’t particularly pleasant.
Working from a novel by Elinor Lipman, which she adapted with co-scriptwriters Alice Arlen and Victor Levin, Hunt keeps the funny business firmly rooted in sharply and warmly observed reality. Indeed, the verisimilitude extends even to her own on-screen appearance: In the lead role of April Epner, a 39-year-old New York schoolteacher who’s painfully aware of her ticking biological time clock, she doesn’t merely deglamorize herself – she occasionally makes herself look positively gaunt.
But, hey, you might look a bit haggard, too, if you had to maneuver through as many emotional mood swings as April does in Then She Found Me. In the opening scenes alone, she runs the gamut from the thrill of marrying Ben (Matthew Broderick), her boyish handsome sweetheart, to the stress of coping with her ailing adoptive mother (Lynn Cohen).
Truth to tell, April has profoundly mixed feelings about being an adoptive child --- feelings that, of course, she feels guilty for feeling -- but that makes her even more eager, if not desperate, to have a child of her own. Unfortunately, her parenting plans must be back-burnered when, a scant few months after the wedding, Ben decides their marriage was “a mistake.” Mind you, he feels really bad about this -- he, not she, bursts out crying during their seriocomic break-up scene – but April is the one who’s left in a condition not unlike shellshock.
Frank (Colin Firth), a recently divorced father of one of April’s students, offers brutally pragmatic advice: “Don’t do anything until you’ve slept. Don’t let anybody try to set you up with anyone.” But just when April assumes life is returning to an even keel – “It’s not going to get any worse than this!” – her adoptive mother dies.
So she is all the more emotionally vulnerable – and, at the same time, warily skeptical – when the brassy and self-absorbed Bernice (Bette Milder), a local TV talk-show host, introduces herself as April’s biological mother. (Who’s her father? Well, would you believe Steve McQueen?) Discombobulated by so much upheaval, and anxious to avoid Bernice’s maternal outreach, April finds herself reaching out to the equally vulnerable Frank.
And that is when she gets the ultimate good-news/bad-news double whammy: She discovers she is pregnant. But the father is Ben.
It’s all too easy to imagine a scenario such as this being played for broad farce and/or sappy sentiment. All the more reason, then, to marvel at Hunt’s light touch and discerning taste. Granted, there’s a least one instance of stunt casting as a kind of sight gag – Salman Rushide (yes, that Salman Rushdie) cameos as April’s bemused obstetrician – but even this isn’t played for big laughs. Throughout Then She Found Me, Hunt prioritizes consistency of tone and appropriateness of scale, so that nothing gets out of hand – and, more important, nothing can be taken for granted. Sure, it’s a comedy. But it’s one in which the lead characters always seem just one misstep away from full-out tragedy.
Better still, it’s also a comedy that attempts, with frequent success, to avoid the predictable. Exhibit A: Bernice’s assistant (John Benjamin Hickey) obviously nurses a heavy crush on his employee -- but absolutely nothing comes of this. Exhibit B: April confronts Bernice about the real reason why, long ago, the older woman put her infant daughter up for adoption – and the movie makes no excuses, doesn’t bother to deny or decry Bernice’s career-centric selfishness.
Speaking of Bernice: The words “subdued” and “Bette Midler” seldom appear in the same sentence, but maybe Hunt has strong powers of persuasion, or ready access to tranquilizer darts. Whatever the reason, Bernice remains amusing and engaging, almost in spite of herself, largely because of Midler’s meticulous underplaying of a character that could have come off as a caricature.
A similar sort of emotional truth resounds in Firth’s portrayal of Frank, a sweet-natured fellow who’s genuinely startling in his ferocious rage and deep anguish when he feels he has been betrayed. (Hunt refuses to tip the scales, and thereby make it easy for us, during this confrontation. Good for her.) By contrast, Ben remains a feckless lightweight from first scene to last. Still, Broderick somehow finds a way to make the guy’s Peter Pan Syndrome oddly poignant.
Hunt the actress serves Hunt the filmmaker very well, conveying nimble intelligence and self-deprecating humor even when April acts too impulsively – and, on more then one occasion, too selfishly – for her own good. On both sides of the camera, she displays an unerring sense of balance. Bravo.
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