What Women Want.(Then She Found Me)(Movie review)

Byline: editor: Valerie Steiker

Helen Hunt stars in--and directs--an adult romantic comedy. John Powers reviews.

It's a Hollywood cliche that male movie stars go on to become directors (even Ben Affleck has gotten into the act) while famous actresses rarely do--there's Barbra, Jodie, Diane, and who else? One hoping to lengthen the list is Helen Hunt, whose filmmaking debut, Then She Found Me, sees the Oscar-winning actress working on both sides of the camera. Based on Elinor Lipman's popular novel, this comic drama brings a grown-up edge to Hunt's trademark role: the sharp, decent, slightly neurotic woman struggling with the madness of ordinary life.

She plays April Epner, a 39-year-old schoolteacher who's dying to have a baby but merely has an infantile husband, Ben (Matthew Broderick). He walks out on her at the worst possible moment: Her nurturing adoptive mother has just died, and her life's been invaded by Bernice (Bette Midler), a brassy TV host who claims to be her birth mother. The trouble is, the woman appears to be a pathological liar. As if this weren't disorienting enough, April also meets a new man, Frank (Colin Firth), a divorced writer who promptly regales her with unsolicited breakup advice: "Don't let anyone fix you up with anyone." Naturally, Frank turns out to be her soul mate, but April's so discombobulated by Bernice and so obsessed with having a child that she runs the risk of wrecking everything.

Then She Found Me is the sort of film often dismissed as a "chick flick," as if caring about love, children, and mother-daughter relationships were somehow trivial. But April's story explores some treacherous psychological terrain--in particular, her fierce desire to give birth to a "real" daughter rather than have one who was simply adopted, as she herself had been. Still, the movie often feels formulaic, not least in its image of Frank as yet another version of Mr. Darcy. Happily, Firth has become a canny performer who moves easily from the ranting ex-husband to the alluring suitor who doubts his own allure. And Midler, at 62, stills whirs with the queen-bee panache that first made her a star.

The story's emotional anchor is Hunt, whose acting has grown deeper and darker in the years since Mad About You --she's far less perky, far less eager to be liked. She gives April an air of acrid desperation befitting a middle-aged woman who, confronting personal shock and betrayal, must remake her whole life. It's a startlingly naked performance, perhaps because Hunt herself has reached a moment of transition. After a lifetime of acting (she landed her first role at nine), she's reached the age when Hollywood starts finding actresses dispensable. But Hunt obviously doesn't intend to go away. A promising first feature, Then She Found Me suggests that she doesn't buy F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous line about there being no second acts in American lives.

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