Writer/director Helen Hunt stepped up on the Paramount Theater stage Saturday night to introduce her directorial debut this way: “Everything I think or care about is in this movie.” She’s not kidding. Then She Found Me is stuffed to the gills with big, life changing issues and capital lettered important topics. Too many in fact. Though it’s a well meaning film with some well done, individual moments, it tries to do too much all at once, and suffers for it.
Then She Found Me is based loosely on a book by Elinor Lipman. I say loosely, because Ms. Hunt openly admits to making drastic changes to the story, adding in a lot of her own characters and in many ways changing the entire point of the novel on which her script is based. In Helen’s version, the story follows a woman named April, whom she plays herself, through a series of betrayals. Give the movie’s celebrity actor/director a lot of credit here. April is a dowdy looking, normal woman. Partly out of necessity because of her schedule and partly because she wanted the character to seem real, Helen plays her without almost any makeup, and sacrifices her glamorous Hollywood appearance for her art.
April is a nearly 40-year-old school teacher who has just broken with her husband. She desperately wants a baby, but at her age she’s running out of time. Oh she’s also adopted and her adoptive mother has just died. Into the picture appears Bernice Graves, a celebrity talk show host who shows up on April’s doorstep and claims to be her birth mother. April has also recently become involved with the comedically put-upon yet still dashingly handsome single father of one of her students, a guy named Frank, played with zest by Colin Firth.
All those different aspects of April’s life collide as the movie uses them as a means to explore all those things that Helen Hunt cares about. She does a good job of avoiding getting bogged down in overbearing melodrama. For a first time director, Hunt does an amazing job of balancing the movie’s heavy elements with the lighter tone. She’s shooting for comedy/drama and achieves it. It helps that she’s got a great cast. Colin Firth is a scene stealer as Frank and Bette Midler is, well, Bette.
No the only thing really wrong with Then She Found Me is a writer/director who’s too attached to her own material. Maybe if someone else had directed her script they’d have had the good sense to simplify it a bit and cut out some of the confusion. Helen though, just can’t resist squeezing in one more thing, and that means she ends up trying to tackle some of those big issues she cares about as random asides, shoehorned into the plot where they’re out of place. Then She Found Me is an entertaining and interesting film, but one that’s ultimately flawed. Still, as a director and a writer the former Mad About You mega-star shows a surprising amount of promise. It’ll be worth paying attention to whatever she decides to do next.
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