Then She Found Me

I’m not sure Helen Hunt is a great actress, but she is an actress I like to watch. She always plays basically the same character – I’ve only see her play out of this character once, and the result was flat and unconvincing. The “Helen Hunt character” is an intensely private woman, always feeling invaded upon; a woman who hates her beauty because it causes people to look at her. She is a woman trying to manage her life, but never feeling quite up to the task; she has suffered several deep disappointments, and as a result is left with very little self-confidence (but a desperate need to appear confident) and an awful lot of anger, resentment, and bitterness, none of which she feels allowed to express.

I just wrote a hundred words about this character; I feel like I could write 500 more. It’s an apt description, naturally of her character in “Then She Found Me.” Directed by Hunt and based upon the novel by Elinor Lipman, the depth and complexity of Hunt’s character is the strength of this movie; its weakness is just about everything else. The plot unfolds like an obstacle course. First her husband leaves her, then her mother dies, and so on: it’s just one bad, difficult, or complicating thing after another for April, nearly all of them utterly out of her control, all ploddingly paced so that as soon as she comes to grips with one thing, another happens immediately. If the movie were twenty minutes longer, she might suffer a nervous breakdown, or in some grand karmic reversal, win the lottery.

On the day that her husband leaves her, kindergarten teacher April Epner meets the father (Colin Firth) of one of her students, who is also recently divorced. “Don’t let anyone fix you up with anyone,” he tells her. “A friend of mine set me up on a date, I’m still recovering.” A courtship begins between them, based on the vulnerable bluntness of the recently heartbroken – when you’re forty and your life has just fallen apart, there’s no time or energy for the bullshit of mating rituals. Firth plays the fragile, exhausted, bitterly honest divorcee as if he was born for the role; it’s a solid performance, but doesn’t help the movie much, because his character is in too many ways just a male version of Hunt’s. “Then She Found Me”s knockout punch is a monologue reminiscent of the John Cusack’s at the end of “High Fidelity” – love hurts, but the alternative is worse—except Cusack’s was funny and earnest, and this one is just earnest.

In the midst of it all is Bette Midler, who plays Hunt’s birth mother, reappearing after thirtysome years the day after her adoptive mother dies. It’s not really clear what Midler is doing in this movie, besides providing some brightness and much needed comic relief, and giving Hunt yet another character she needs in her life but can’t trust, for good reasons—Midler can’t seem to come clean with her story. There is a scene in the third act about God that the movie doesn’t quite earn, and yet nearly manages, because it pulls back another layer on Hunt’s character, and what’s there is what you’d intuit would be there, and what I’d be writing about, if I was writing 500 words about Hunt’s character, which is, really, the only interesting part of this movie, the only part really worth writing about.

Recommended

• if you need an antidote to shallow romantic comedies that refuse to take their characters seriously.
• If you find the “Helen Hunt Character” as fascinating as I do.
• If you’re feeling earnest and want a movie with characters who cut through the BS and just tell the truth.

Not Recommended

• If you’re recently divorced, are having trouble having children, or are adopted. (I think. Though it might be cathartic.)
• If you need your truth lightened with comedy.
• If you want plot elements and character elements to blend seamlessly into a perfect narrative unity.
• If you think romantic characters who cut through the BS and just tell the truth is maybe the worst cinematic idea you’ve heard all year

“Then She Found Me” is playing at Abbey Theater in Durango.