Rental Review: Then She Found Me

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It is all too often that movies swing towards one extreme or the other, either portraying life as a screwball comedy or as so melodramatic that nothing in life could possibly be any more tragic. So, when a film as refreshingly honest and subtle in tone as Then She Found Me comes along, you have to just take a deep breath and relax.

Based off the Elinor Lipman novel of the same title, Helen Hunt along with Alice Arlen and Victor Levin pen a beautiful true-to-life tale of an adopted divorcee that is confronted with situational issues all at one time.

Unlike many dramas that focus on a character dealing with one big dilemma, Hunt’s character April Epner finds her self mourning her mother only a day after her childish husband Ben (Matthew Broderick) decides to walk out the door. His claim only that this was not the life he wanted. Only a month later, as she begins falling for Frank (Colin Firth), the father of one of her students (she is a teacher), she discovers that she is pregnant with Ben’s child. To complicate things, shortly after burying her adopted mother, her blood mother, Bernice Graves (Bette Midler) finds her and asks to meet her. Oh, and did I mention Epner is Jewish and struggles with her faith in the film? Yes, sounds like too much for one story, but Hunt manages to keep it all under control, deftly blending the interconnectivity of all the issues.

Epner is someone you love and hate, a complicated mess of a woman with grace to keep herself going as life continues to throw curveballs. Hunt manages in front of the lens to present a 39-year-old schoolteacher tottering on the brink of a life alone as she ages or finding the strength to start over. Ambivalent about letting go of her past she struggles internally towards a new future, with a new mother and a new man.

Hunt, the director, takes us to the brink of predictability and then, much like a wheel of fortune, rolls into a completely new take than where we thought she would go. This saves the sentiment from dripping into a Lifetime movie of the month.

The script often cut through all the melodrama of the movie version of life and captured lines that ring utterly true. In fact, one of them, I got from the father of my child in the same awkward kind of conversation. Epner asks Ben if he has anything to say and his only response is “I don’t know what to say.”

And just as I would begin to get irritated by one of the characters, ok really, Frank, for being perfect, he goes and becomes needy and angry and throws tantrums (sadly making him even more perfect.) They are both broken and left to carry on the pieces of their normal life by two who fled. When together, their on screen chemistry has awkward moments, real moments, that make the two of them well suited for each other.

But then she loses him due to her own stupid mistakes. And then she loses Ben’s baby. And then she walks away from her mother. Everything new that seemed unshakable and worth moving on for, is broken. She doesn’t have the happy ending with the dream baby and dream man and burgeoning warm relationship of a mother. Instead, we see a forlorn, broken Hunt whose spirit seems squashed. Only her brother Freddy (Ben Shenkman) remains there for her as he does silently through the film. And even as Epner can’t forgive her mother for her selfishness, she learns of her own when her brother reveals his side of the fence growing up as the “unadopted” child.

The movie reminds us, no matter how often life changes around us, it does us good to be open to changing just a bit ourselves too.

And as pleasant as the moment was, you almost forget as you are swept up in the story, that Salman Rushdie has a cameo as the ob/gyn. Yeah, that Rushdie. The moment is lighthearted, and Rushdie, a clear non-actor, subtly pulls off the im-just-gonna-play-along-and-not-ask-why-so-many-different-men-are-here-with-you look.

Overall the movie is a real treat and I am sorry I missed it at the screening at SXSW in March. The small indie film cost 3.5 million to make and has broken even at the box office. I hope rentals soar as Hunt has proven herself adept and I look forward to her sophomore effort.