Everything goes wrong for April (Helen Hunt, who also directs) in the opening minutes of this movie: her husband Ben (Matthew Broderick) announces that he’s leaving her, then throws her work schedule into chaos by not appearing the following day at the school where they both teach.
Fretting to her sickly mother about her marital woes (April wants kids and she’s already hitting 40), she gets less in the way of a sympathetic ear than a dollop of practical advice: “So adopt!” snaps her mother. But April wants more: she wants the sense of deep connection between herself and a child of her own flesh.
Just as April is wondering what more can go awry, her adoptive mother dies; and finally, fate delivers the coup de grace which gives the movie its title: Then She Found Me.
She, in this case, is Helen’s biological mother, Bernice, and she’s played by Bette Midler as a bundle of excitement, nervous energy, over-solicitousness verging on the obnoxious, and half-truths (Bernice’s first fishy story: that April is the love child of Steve McQueen).
Even as she’s reeling from her close encounters with Bernice and fielding the occasional plaintive phone call from Ben, April finds herself falling in love with Frank (Colin Firth), a recent divorcée and single father with a brusque manner that can be charming and comic even as it deflects the risks of getting too close. Naturally, his obvious retreat into such armor to protect his wounded heart only attracts April all the more, and, naturally, complications arise when Ben drifts back into the picture. What April needs in the midst of her crisis is a little maternal affection, and the comedy is supposed to be derived from Bernice’s utter inability to offer it.
However, Hunt’s direction doesn’t do the trick. The movie is not taut enough to sustain a comedic tone; even when the inconsistent script offers juicy possibilities, the movie fails to deliver.
Stars of Midler’s magnitude and Broderick’s range should be able to find their way past such weak material, but Hunt doesn’t give them what they need to make their performances work. Only Firth, with his blunt, square-edged style, manages to create an enjoyable character out of his lines, and he does it by allowing a wide, white-hot streak of rage to underscore Frank’s nascent affections for April so that when the moment comes (and come it does, along with Ben in a ham-handed scene of back-seat dry-humping that doesn’t stay dry), Frank is primed for a raging flame-out of anguish and outrage.
That’s the most emotionally honest moment in the film; everything else feels canned and saturated with preservatives, from April and Bernice’s mother/daughter bathtub bonding to Ben’s inability to grow up and take charge of family issues, to April’s relationship with her brother Freddy (Ben Shenkman), to Bernice’s final historical whitewash and its devastating consequences.
Hunt’s creative choices are often uninspired and seem arbitrary; a long, static shot during Ben’s fraught, stumbling admission that he no longer wants to be married (it’s more of a non-admission, really, since he never manages to spit it out) is upset by a sudden twist that should be hilarious and charged with pathos, but it comes off feeling cheap and in poor taste.
Then there’s a pregnancy subplot complete with the inevitable shots of ultrasound imaging, which are not made any less of a cliche (and obligation) for the slow pace Hunt brings to the moment as onlookers gaze and gush. Salman Rushdie makes an appearance here as an obstetrician, and he’s sadly underused (though he does show some promise as an actor when a querulous look he gives April and her shifting retinue of family feels like the same look the viewer feels himself giving the whole movie). Hunt is clearly inexperienced as a director, and the movie feels tentative, falling back on gimmickry as though pleading to be liked.
Hunt does offer us something American cinema is desperately in need of: roles for mature women who actually look like they’ve escaped their twenties. It will be interesting to see what Hunt comes up with once she matures as a filmmaker.••• –Kilian Melloy
Kilian Melloy reviews media, conducts interviews, and writes commentary for EDGEBoston, where he also serves as Assistant Arts Editor.
