Helen Hunt (2008)
Helen Hunt is taking on a lot on her directing debut. She’s not just in the main part – she’s in nearly every frame. She can’t have spent too much time behind the camera and it shows – in the lack of rhythm of some scenes, and the frequency of mistimed lines. Hunt’s career as a leading film actress stalled within a couple of years of her Oscar win for As Good As It Gets. She can hardly be criticised for deciding that taking charge of as much as possible is the best way of sealing a starring role (she also co-produced and worked on the screenplay). Hunt is ambitious too in her mutually exclusive aims of making a film that’s moving and harmless. Whether the fault is with the original (a novel by Elinor Lipman) or the adaptation (by Alice Arlen and Victor Levin, with Hunt), the material is pretty thin and formulaic – but it’s treated as if it had layers and substance.
Hunt plays April – thirty-nine years old, Jewish; she teaches young children and is desperate for a child of her own, to the point of obsession. Adopted herself, she’s knotted up with frustrated dismay when family members suggest that adopting a child may be her best bet. After less than a year of marriage, her mother’s boy husband Ben (Matthew Broderick) walks out. In the course of the next few days, April’s adoptive mother dies. She meets Frank (Colin Firth), a single father whose kids she teaches, and is strongly attracted to him. Her biological mother Bernice (Bette Midler) – a daytime television celebrity – turns up out of the blue. Within the next few weeks and just as she’s embarked on a relationship with Frank, April finds out that she’s pregnant – her husband’s parting shot.
As an actress, Helen Hunt has a gift for creating believable, likeable characters – ‘ordinary people’ but without the condescension that phrase implies – and for giving emotionally nuanced inflections to otherwise undistinguished dialogue. She does it again here; unfortunately, her reality has the effect of aggravating the problems she causes herself by taking the script too seriously. Because she quickly makes April convincing as an individual, you expect her to get across what it must be like to have your life turned upside down this way in the space of a few days. It’s an impossible task. Hunt is such a pleasant actress that you feel bad for feeling disappointed in her but, as director, she has only herself to blame.
Then She Found Me would work better if it was played in a quicker, lighter style that recognised the farcical quality of the plot’s incredibly rapid sequence of events. The gallantry of April and Frank gets tiresome. As usual, Firth tries but you can see the effort more than you can feel the charms he holds for April. Much of the time, Firth makes his lines sound like lines; when he doesn’t, he suggests a man who’s rather alienating. Bette Midler can’t help giving the film a comic lift but the director seems mesmerised by Midler’s verve as a performer – the camera gets as much as possible out of her trademark tiptoe-wiggle – and she seems uneasy. Midler is eventually undone by the film’s relentless moral uplift. You can just about believe in this woman for as long as she’s shown to be mendacious and selfish but you can’t believe the final happy family scene. As she breathes in the fresh air of a decent life, her blurry how-did-I-get-here look suggests that it’s the actress rather than the character who can’t make sense of the nice new world she’s landed in. Bernice’s demanding professional schedule is one of several elements in the film that come and go for the sake of convenience (the importance to April of her Jewishness and even her anxiety for a child are others).
Then She Found Me is entertaining enough and hard to take offence at – except for its own determined inoffensiveness. I found myself rooting for April’s husband, not just because Matthew Broderick gives the most successful performance in the film, but because he’s an ignoble character with no excuses. Broderick is actually a year older than Hunt but looks younger than his forty-six years. She’s so skinny that she looks older. Their looks are an amusing expression of their characters – while April is prematurely careworn, Ben’s immaturity ranges from (just) post-pubertal to infantile. (It’s not the sex he finds problematic in marriage; it’s the bits in between.) Broderick is very funny. Ben knows how despicable he is but, whenever he’s given a demonstration of his inadequacy, he literally looks to April to solve the problem. When he, she and Frank go together to hospital for her ultrasound, Hunt and Firth emit heartfelt expressions of wonder at the images of the embryo on the screen – Broderick echoes them in an exquisitely half-hearted way.
The greater emotional connection between Hunt and Broderick than between her and Firth is the strongest element in the film because it threatens to subvert its wholesome progress. (Imagine what Moonstruck would have been like if there’d been a spark between Cher and Danny Aiello but not between her and Nicolas Cage. One of the things that made Moonstruck such a great romantic comedy was the real, very different friction with both the actors.) April’s obstetrician, bizarrely, is played by Salman Rushdie. This might have worked as a one-scene cameo. It certainly doesn’t when Rushdie returns to announce that the foetus has died, then again to join embarrassedly in a silent prayer as April tries for artificial insemination. With Ben Shenkman as April’s younger (non-adopted) brother. The score by David Mansfield reinforces the film’s atmosphere of tentative hopefulness.
25 September 2008
