Then She Found Me film review

certificate_15

THEN SHE FOUND ME

We last saw her as Mel Gibson's simpering sidekick in the rom-com What Women Want but now Helen Hunt takes the reins with her own film project which she directs, co-writes and acts in. While this is no mean feat, you can't help noticing that the film suffers as a result of this ball-juggling in all three instances.

The film tells the story of April, a late thirty-something schoolteacher desperate to conceive with newly-wed husband Ben (Matthew Broderick) but who then endures a run of bad luck.

Ben walks out, her adoptive sick mother dies, she suffers a miscarriage and then abrasive talk show host Bernice arrives in her life, claiming to be her biological mother. Whilst trying to cope with all this, April embarks on a relationship with the charmless Frank, a father to one of her pupils.

Despite all this misfortune April remains a strangely unsympathetic character throughout. This is partially due to the film fluctuating between a kind of glib sit-com and a sloppy romantic saga, and partially because her relationships with the supporting characters are stilted and unlikely.

Ben and Frank in particular suffer from a lack of credibility and Frank is played with an almost sinister weirdness by Colin Firth - not a quality you look for in a leading man. Even Bette Midler as Bernice cannot quite salvage things, though she is easily the stand-out performance in an awkward cast who don't seem to know what they are doing. A bizarre cameo by Salman Rushdie as a doctor only serves to underline this.

With these sorts of problems the buck stops with the director (though some truly diabolical moments in a bad script don't help) which may or may not be Helen Hunt's artistic forte. While she shows an actor's understanding of pace, the film lacks dramatic focus and tone and often the scenes are contrived and awkward.

The story (adapted from the novel by Elinor Lipman) clearly has screen potential as a bittersweet take on motherhood and belonging. However the film somehow misses its cue and ends up as a meandering yarn on human neuroses. April may well have been found, as per the film's title - but viewers are likely to be well and truly lost.

Kate Coffey