Then She Found Me
Directed by Helen Hunt
Although Helen Hunt is best known for her role on a hit sitcom in which she was all smiles, her performance in Then She Found Me, which she also directed, suggests that she’s most comfortable when she’s frowning. She plays April, a schoolteacher in search of an answer to life’s many hurdles; and for much of the film, her mouth forms a deep grimace, suggesting an inability to handle all that life’s thrown at her: being left by her husband Ben (Matthew Broderick) after they’ve been married only a few days; being followed by Bernice (Bette Midler), April’s cheerful, annoying estranged birth mother who’s determined to reconnect; and what should be a smooth new relationship with Frank (Colin Firth), a divorcee whose son is in April’s preschool class. Instead, April and Frank are mired in angst, for no discernable reason, other than having the misfortune of being stuck in a downer of a movie.
Hunt, along with Victor Levin and Alice Arlen, adapted the screenplay from a novel by Elinor Lipman. Perhaps the novel wove April’s predicaments gracefully into one cohesive narrative (I have yet to read it), but Hunt’s film version fails to do so. The scenes clunk along from Bernice to Frank to Ben, with little to ground the emotional monologues the characters fling at one another. Much of the action feels stagnant, anchored down by overly cadenced dialogue, which makes Then She Found Me feel like a piece of theater—a death sentence for a film that strains so earnestly to portray a realistic slice of life.
Unfortunately, one of the only elements that reminds us more of the screen than the stage is the clichéd, forgettable romantic dialogue. The always-charming Colin Firth almost makes his banal lines work, but he has too little to work with. We ultimately feel embarrassed for Frank: Thanks to Firth, he seems like a smart guy with real potential; but thanks to the script, he’s ultimately not very interesting. Poor Matthew Broderick is stuck in a corner as April’s loser ex-husband; the script can’t seem to decide whether he’s sympathetic or not, and Broderick is forced to make up for the wishy-washiness with lots of shrugging and forlorn looks. Midler sells herself as an overbearing if estranged mother (although she’s bizarrely cast as a bemused gentile to Hunt’s religious Jew), but April’s waxing and waning impatience with her is just one more irritation we have to put up with as we tolerate this taxing drama of nerves.
Directed by Helen Hunt
Although Helen Hunt is best known for her role on a hit sitcom in which she was all smiles, her performance in Then She Found Me, which she also directed, suggests that she’s most comfortable when she’s frowning. She plays April, a schoolteacher in search of an answer to life’s many hurdles; and for much of the film, her mouth forms a deep grimace, suggesting an inability to handle all that life’s thrown at her: being left by her husband Ben (Matthew Broderick) after they’ve been married only a few days; being followed by Bernice (Bette Midler), April’s cheerful, annoying estranged birth mother who’s determined to reconnect; and what should be a smooth new relationship with Frank (Colin Firth), a divorcee whose son is in April’s preschool class. Instead, April and Frank are mired in angst, for no discernable reason, other than having the misfortune of being stuck in a downer of a movie.
Hunt, along with Victor Levin and Alice Arlen, adapted the screenplay from a novel by Elinor Lipman. Perhaps the novel wove April’s predicaments gracefully into one cohesive narrative (I have yet to read it), but Hunt’s film version fails to do so. The scenes clunk along from Bernice to Frank to Ben, with little to ground the emotional monologues the characters fling at one another. Much of the action feels stagnant, anchored down by overly cadenced dialogue, which makes Then She Found Me feel like a piece of theater—a death sentence for a film that strains so earnestly to portray a realistic slice of life.
Unfortunately, one of the only elements that reminds us more of the screen than the stage is the clichéd, forgettable romantic dialogue. The always-charming Colin Firth almost makes his banal lines work, but he has too little to work with. We ultimately feel embarrassed for Frank: Thanks to Firth, he seems like a smart guy with real potential; but thanks to the script, he’s ultimately not very interesting. Poor Matthew Broderick is stuck in a corner as April’s loser ex-husband; the script can’t seem to decide whether he’s sympathetic or not, and Broderick is forced to make up for the wishy-washiness with lots of shrugging and forlorn looks. Midler sells herself as an overbearing if estranged mother (although she’s bizarrely cast as a bemused gentile to Hunt’s religious Jew), but April’s waxing and waning impatience with her is just one more irritation we have to put up with as we tolerate this taxing drama of nerves.
