Perhaps realising her days as a bankable leading lady are numbered, Helen Hunt has made her debut behind the camera – and it’s not the auspicious start she would have hoped for. In Then She Found Me she plays April Epner, a 39-year-old school teacher who is struggling to conceive a child with her husband Ben (Matthew Broderick). When he decides he can no longer cope with their marriage and walks out, it signals an almost complete restructuring of April’s life as she knows it: her adoptive mother dies and her biological mother, the talk-show host Bernice Graves (Bette Midler), tries to horn in on her life. April also finds herself attracted to the nice-guy father of one of her students, Frank (Colin Firth).
Thus come the corollary questions: is her biological mother on the level or a lying charlatan? Can April have found real love so soon after the dissolution of her marriage? And just whose baby is she carrying?
It’s not a bad plot as far as dramedies go, but the execution leaves much to be desired. The production values are scrappy to say the least – the boom mike appears in shot more than once and there are some glaring continuity errors. It also feels like a stage play or telemovie in some of its slower moments. Hunt’s training wheels as a director are all too visible and Then She Found Me is unlikely to have producers bashing down her door.
What really cuts this movie off at the knees, though, is Ben and April’s relationship. She’s so obviously incompatible with this self-centred man-child that it’s hard to understand why she married him in the first place – and why she would ever contemplate getting back with him after being so rudely jilted. It’s a shaky foundation that’s unable to support the multi-level story built on it.
The acting is competent but nothing remarkable: Midler tones down her usual Loud Jewish Woman shtick to play Not Quite So Loud, Non-Practicing Jewish Woman, while a haggard, undernourished Helen Hunt trying to pass herself off as a woman six years her junior is pitiable. Colin Firth is the only thing standing between this movie and a meaner score, although his turn is nothing he hasn’t done before in Bridget Jones’s Diary and Love Actually.
If it didn’t have so much talent to pull it up by its bootstraps, Then She Found Me might have been a complete disaster – but the all-star cast does just enough to lift it above mediocrity. Faint praise, indeed.