Une histoire de famille

"Then She Found Me" is a wretched movie, and it should not be. The talent here is undeniable: Helen Hunt, Colin Firth, Matthew Broderick, Bette Midler. The problem? An unforgivably awful script. Can anyone in Hollywood read? Hollywood is a world capital of entertainment, of magic; there is so much talent there. And yet, year after year, these awful scripts are greenlighted and talented writers starve. What gives?

The main character, April Epner (Helen Hunt) is never fleshed out. What we do know about her makes her incredibly unappealing. She's obsessed with her plump, middle-aged, boy-man husband (Broderick) who has left her to live in his mother's house. April is shrill and rude to her dying mother. She's manipulative and callow in her interactions with Colin Firth, the man all sensible women love and would treat like the treasure he is. In a particularly painful scene, Frank (Firth) makes a poignant confession of love to April, and she blows him off in order to gripe to her husband in a cell phone call. I was literally shouting at the screen, "Run, Colin, run! Get away from this nasty loser female as fast as ever you can!" It doesn't stop there. April attempts to have a quickie with her husband in the back seat of a car. On a busy city street. In broad daylight. With the car door open. It was such an ugly, gratuitous scene. It marked April as someone suffering from borderline personality disorder. But it doesn't stop there. April casually invites both her husband and her boyfriend to her gynecologist's office for an exam, in stirrups and johnny coat, to ascertain that she is pregnant, by her husband. WHY should we care about this woman? Why should Colin Firth be attracted to her? What inspired his poignant love confession? Nothing. There is nothing on screen, nothing in the script, that ever fleshes his attraction out.

Speaking of "flesh" … if you read comments here or on the web, you can see that most viewers were fixated on how haggard Helen Hunt looks. She is very thin, and time has not been kind to her face. In some scenes, it is impossible to look at her and not want to sit her down and get some food into her, she looks that much like a refugee from some catastrophe. Some viewers applauded Hunt for being "brave" and allowing the camera access, but focusing on Helen Hunt's courage utterly detracts from ever registering April Epner as a flesh and blood human being. You're not thinking about April Epner, you're thinking, "Hmm…how could Helen Hunt change her look?" Similarly, Bette Midler is never convincing as the character she is playing. She is always Bette Midler, bodacious saloon singer, breezing through a film with a script that is decidedly unworthy of any attempt on her part to bother to pretend to be anyone but Bette Midler.

Failed films like this are so painful because there are so few movies made for women over forty. The glory days that could produce a script like Mankiewicz's "All About Eve" are long behind us. Drek like this make us miss classics like that all the more. Older women do lead interesting lives. There are so many real questions that this film could have explored for a forty-plus schoolteacher whose husband wants to leave her. This film ignored all of those real questions and just plopped Colin Firth, the perfect man, and Bette Midler, STAR, in as phony, bogus attempts to stir up some kind of a plot. Sorry – without writing talent and insight, which this script utterly lacks – even starpower like Firth's and Middler's can't create a worthy film.

If "Then She Found Me" got any real notice when it came out, it certainly passed by me. I didn't know what to expect when I chose the streaming video version, mainly because I've always liked Helen Hunt, and she's backed by a pretty impressive cast. Although it's certainly no blockbuster, the film is well worth seeing. Since it is immediately disclosed, I don't feel I'm spoiling anything in saying that Hunt plays the part of an adopted woman whose marriage at age 39 fails almost immediately because her groom (Matthew Broderick) is completely immature. Hunt's character (April Hepner) is unexpectedly confronted by her birth mother (Bette Midler) and also finds herself in a potentially romantic relationship with Frank (Colin Firth), a single father with two children whose wife left the family to travel around the world with her lover. April desperately wants to have a child, and time is quickly running out. Complications ensue on several fronts -- with her birth mother, with the husband from whom she is separated, and with Frank and Frank's kids. Hunt directed this film and co-wrote the script. Although she's a little old to be 39 again, she's still slim, beautiful, a skilled comic actress and believable in a serious, emotionally wrenching role. I can't give the movie more than a 6 but I liked it. The ending, which I won't describe, is plausible but a little too abrupt. However, I'll concede that filling the gap could not have been done quickly. And that's a potent argument for ending it without an explanation as they chose to do.

Having just seen "Baby Mama", which covers the same emotional territory but in much broader slapstick terms, this 2008 serio-comedy is driven far more by character than situation. In this case, the protagonist is 39-year-old April Epner, a New York schoolteacher who was raised in a close-knit Jewish family and desperately wants the biological connection of a birth child before her alarm clock goes off. She marries fellow teacher Ben, an inarticulate schlub with a terminal case of the Peter Pan Syndrome. After a brief time, he wants out of the marriage, and at almost the same time, April's adoptive mother Trudy dies. Not even a month goes by before April's biological mother suddenly shows up in the form of the brazenly overbearing but genuinely likable Bernice Graves, a cable talk-show hostess who is something of a local media celebrity. If life was not complicated enough, April also finds herself drawn to Frank, the single father of one of her pupils. Unlike Ben, he feels the same about April but is fighting his own bitterness about his own recent divorce.

Not only does Helen Hunt star as April, but she also co-wrote the screenplay with Alice Arlen and Victor Levin and makes her big-screen directorial debut. Granted she's more impressive as an actress than a filmmaker, but as a director and writer, she makes the most of a storyline that stacks the deck a bit like a Lifetime TV-movie. There are enough realistic surprises that take the plot off the rails in a good way. Looking gaunt and avoiding much make-up, Hunt is really playing a variation of the beaten-down waitress she played in "As Good As It Gets", as she carries that same constantly pained expression of disappointment and looks about to explode during moments of emotional duress. However, a decade later, Hunt inhabits the character more naturalistically this time and with a deeper sense of vulnerability and haggard exhaustion. Perhaps to minimize any unnecessary dramatic risk, Hunt cast the other principal roles with actors playing familiar parts. Matthew Broderick effectively portrays Ben as the perpetually dazed man-child he is, while perennial love interest Colin Firth gives texture to the seemingly ideal suitor Frank, especially as he edges toward the breaking point in tolerating the sum of April's foibles.

In one of her increasingly rare screen appearances, Bette Midler gives a scene-stealing performance as Bernice. She lights up the movie with Bernice's unfettered sense of abandonment while gradually exposing the secrets that threaten to undermine her newly found relationship with her daughter. Other parts are played with minimum fuss - Ben Shenkman as April's physician brother Freddy feeling put-upon for having a biological tie to their mother, and Salman Rushdie (author of "The Satanic Verses" which brought him a death sentence from the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989) as April's doctor. Hunt provides her actors, especially herself, plenty of good, meaty scenes with opportunities for bravura moments. It just doesn't quite come together as a whole by the end, and that may be that Hunt is so used to the sitcom format of the long-running series, "Mad About You". The result is that some laughs feel a bit contrived, some scene transitions seem jarring, and some expected character revelations are given short shrift. Nonetheless, the dramatic developments toward the end carry the emotional impact necessary to make the movie truly affecting, and Hunt should be given credit for a most auspicious debut as a filmmaker.

In a featurette on the DVD release version of THEN SHE FOUND ME writer (with Alice Arlen and Victor Levin) /producer/director Helen Hunt shares a ten year journey to have a film made of a novel by Elinor Lipman. Her cast shares in the very sentimental story of Hunt's devotion and seemingly endless charisma and abilities. The explanation for making this budget film are in many ways more successful than the film, a work the cast seems determined to classify as a comedy but a work that is far more a human drama.

April Epner (Helen Hunt) is married to fellow schoolteacher Ben Green (Matthew Broderick) and longs to have a baby before her advancing age prevents her dream. April was adopted as an infant by a Jewish couple who subsequently gave birth to April's brother Freddy (Ben Shenkman): April has always longed to have been Freddy's biological equal, wondering what it would feel like NOT to be adopted. April's busy life implodes: Ben has decided he doesn't like his life and leaves April, April's mother dies, April meets Frank (Colin Firth) a recently divorced writer and father of two children, and April is contacted by a man who can put April in touch with her birth mother - popular TV talk show hostess Bernice Graves (Bette Midler). And if these turns of events weren't traumatic enough, April discovers that she has become pregnant by Ben and Ben is unsure whether he can handle the restructuring of his life to accommodate April. Cautiously April and Frank begin a rather tenuous courtship which is almost immediately threatened by April's discovery of her pregnant state. April and Bernice meet, exchange backgrounds, and make pacts to test their biologic relationship. How each of these characters makes promises that eventually damage each other and then resolve in unexpected ways becomes a study of the meaning of love and compassion among fragile human beings.

While not a satisfying story on every level and a film too cluttered with inconvenient editing choices, the cast is strong and obviously committed, and the story (neither a comedy or a drama but a mixture of the two) tests credibility. But there are some fine moments and the lessons in human behavior are worth examining. Not a great movie but a strong little small budget film. Grady Harp

I had like Helen Hunt a lot in - As Good as you get – where she won her best actress Oscar in 1997. So, when I heard that she is directing a movie, that interested me. I saw the trailers, and though they did not immediately attract me, I decided to give this movie a go.

In her late thirtees, schoolteacher April Epner (Helen Hunt) - seeking to be pregnant and be a biological mother - marries Benjamin (Matthew Broderick), but things do not work out her way and they saperate. April's step mother dies, and she gets traced by her biological mother Bernice (Bette Midler) after 38 years. After that, April meets Frank (Colin Firth) – father of two children; both fall in love. Soon she realizes that she is pregnant with the child of her ex-husband Benjamin. April's is undecisiveness between Benjamin and Frank. In meantime – she mis-carries the child, and after a small triffle with Frank, then she realizes adopting a child and being with Frank. That's how the movie ends.

Ten years have passed since Helen won the Oscar. The burden of Oscar always mounts on all those who have won it – they want to do it one more time, and with no strong scripts coming by – they venture into self produced or self directed movies – to showcase their talents – one more Oscar…one more feather of appreciation. Helen's movie as director is such an attempt.

The movie has a story line that is linear, and the characters are complex – but they are not exciting. All of them have acted well. Helen Hunt is a very sensitive actress and she acts brilliantly even with the twitch of her eyes or lips. Bette Midler always fills in the character that becomes her. Colin Firth has mastered the role of one of the other man in a triangle love story and always delivers good performance. Matthew's role is comparatively small.

I could not understand the motivation of Helen's indecisiveness, and that looked foolish to me. Another thing that distracted me from her performance was her aneroxic physic – at times though she calls herself 39 (at her current age of 44 years) – she looks 49. Is becoming so thin something Hollywood actresses learn to do? If done with purpose, I think, they all look terrible. I think Helen could have taken another actress – and the movie would had been much better.

The love scenes and kisses are also felt as if 'breakers' in the flow of the movie. Nothing great about editing, cinematography or music – quite okay and normal.

The movie presents the complexities of middle aged women and their biggest fear of not getting pregnant before time. It also gives a message that 'adopting' a baby is always a good option.

The movie might be liked by women and those men like me - who can sit through a feminine story, trying to understand the other half and their emotions. I will go with… (Stars 5.5 out of 10)