Helen Hunt makes a spectacularly
inauspicious directorial debut with Then She Found Me, a gray little independent film that
not even the brassy presence of Bette Midler can enliven. A little Midler
generally goes a long way, but the film could benefit from more of the showbiz
institution's trademark sass. With Midler missing in action much of the time,
the film drowns in a sea of thudding earnestness.
Adapted from Elinor Lipman's novel, Then
She Found Me casts
Hunt as a childless schoolteacher nervously staring down menopause. When her
weak-willed husband Matthew Broderick leaves her and her adoptive mother dies,
Hunt is thrown into a state of depression and confusion exacerbated by the
sudden appearance of her long-absent biological mother Bette Midler, a local
television celebrity and legend in her own mind who gave Hunt up for adoption
decades earlier, under circumstances that somehow get cloudier the more she
tries to explain them. While struggling to cope with a series of unfortunate
events, Hunt becomes romantically entangled with Colin Firth, a single father
seemingly too good to be true.
That plot description may make the
film sound like the cinematic answer to chick-lit, but it plays with the
trembling sincerity of middling arthouse fare. Firth is typecast once again as
the noble male love interest, but he is, thankfully, afforded one great speech
where his façade of bottomless patience and kindness dissipates, and he gives
into the rage percolating just under the surface. Broderick, meanwhile, is
convincing as a pathetic man-child desperately trying to recapture his lost
youth, but woefully unconvincing as a man Hunt inexplicably finds sexually
irresistible. Hunt co-wrote, produced, and directed this film and gives herself
a juicy lead role (something sorely lacking for women above the age of 30),
which makes it all the more frustrating and perplexing that she and the
lethargic, momentum-free film she shakily carries make so little impression.
The anxieties and angst of middle-class, middle-aged women remain rich,
underexplored cinematic territory, but Hunt's instantly forgettable film does
little to make this deep vein of cultural experience seem vital or exciting.