Then She Found Me (2007)

I had like Helen Hunt a lot in - As Good as you get – where she won her best actress Oscar in 1997. So, when I heard that she is directing a movie, that interested me. I saw the trailers, and though they did not immediately attract me, I decided to give this movie a go.

In her late thirtees, schoolteacher April Epner (Helen Hunt) - seeking to be pregnant and be a biological mother - marries Benjamin (Matthew Broderick), but things do not work out her way and they saperate. April's step mother dies, and she gets traced by her biological mother Bernice (Bette Midler) after 38 years. After that, April meets Frank (Colin Firth) – father of two children; both fall in love. Soon she realizes that she is pregnant with the child of her ex-husband Benjamin. April's is undecisiveness between Benjamin and Frank. In meantime – she mis-carries the child, and after a small triffle with Frank, then she realizes adopting a child and being with Frank. That's how the movie ends.

Ten years have passed since Helen won the Oscar. The burden of Oscar always mounts on all those who have won it – they want to do it one more time, and with no strong scripts coming by – they venture into self produced or self directed movies – to showcase their talents – one more Oscar…one more feather of appreciation. Helen's movie as director is such an attempt.

The movie has a story line that is linear, and the characters are complex – but they are not exciting. All of them have acted well. Helen Hunt is a very sensitive actress and she acts brilliantly even with the twitch of her eyes or lips. Bette Midler always fills in the character that becomes her. Colin Firth has mastered the role of one of the other man in a triangle love story and always delivers good performance. Matthew's role is comparatively small.

I could not understand the motivation of Helen's indecisiveness, and that looked foolish to me. Another thing that distracted me from her performance was her aneroxic physic – at times though she calls herself 39 (at her current age of 44 years) – she looks 49. Is becoming so thin something Hollywood actresses learn to do? If done with purpose, I think, they all look terrible. I think Helen could have taken another actress – and the movie would had been much better.

The love scenes and kisses are also felt as if 'breakers' in the flow of the movie. Nothing great about editing, cinematography or music – quite okay and normal.

The movie presents the complexities of middle aged women and their biggest fear of not getting pregnant before time. It also gives a message that 'adopting' a baby is always a good option.

The movie might be liked by women and those men like me - who can sit through a feminine story, trying to understand the other half and their emotions. I will go withÂ… (Stars 5.5 out of 10)

Fmovies: This is perhaps the most deliciously human movie I've seen this year. It's messy unbearably so at times. The lives these people are living are hard to watch, but you can't look away.

I'm a cinematography girl myself and this movie doesn't have stunning panoramic views or killer photography, but it does have great character development and a cohesive plot.

Helen Hunt kills in the title role and as a director. She made me believe she was the woman not that she was acting to be this woman. There's a subtle difference.

Colin Firth delivers as always and Bette Midler stuns. This movie has Oscar written all over it.

This movie is not bad at all.

I caught the first 10 minutes as I waiting for the film I came to see started. I was intrigued and came back the following week to see this little gem of a movie.

With Colin Firth and Matthew Broderick playing against type, it was a relief not to see them so admirable in their roles. Yes, Bette Midler played the typical yenta shrew but hey, at least we see Bette. She's been away from the screen for far too long.

I'll be the first to tell you I have never been a Helen Hunt fan at all. I have never even seen her hit t.v. series, Mad About You. Something about her just rubbed me the wrong way in the movies I have seen her in. But then, I saw this movie and I loved it and she did a terrific job in her production.

Seriously. All these people who are criticizing her are slamming her for the wrong reasons. Why? This is one of those FEW films in life in which it's neither the director, writer, or actor's fault. If there is any downside, it's the editor's fault. Yes, it is.

Why? Because the editor chopped up the scenes. In the editing room, a director can become a genius or a fool. This is one of those cases. I do not fault Helen's direction. I fault the editor here. Some of these scenes should have been allowed to breathe on their own, not jump cut from one emotion to the next.

Despite that editing distraction, this chick flick has heart, it does have emotion. How do I know this? I heard a lot of sniffling, tears of sorrow and joy in the audience when this film ended. That is what a film is suppose to do, make you feel something, be a participant, not a witness.

Then She Found Me fmovies. Helen Hunt I always considered a very mediocre actress and general a miss cast in every production. I guess that makes me bias. When a bad actor is also a poor director and then casts her self as the lead character..now that is just aiming for disaster. And in all fairness it doesn't have to be, Ben Affleck: horrible actor-great director.

The story, resembling a season of Days of our Lives in a nutshell doesn't become deeper than a wading pool and Hunt making painful faces makes just for a lot of smurking. On top of that character April Epner is so annoying that you don't understand why people are making any effort for her. Colin Firth looks way too young and too sparkly for his part. And although she keeps saying that she is 39, Hunt obviously is far too old for her part and looks it. Firth and Midler are playing her off the screen and wasting their talents here. Dreadful waste of time.

We've all had our share of bad weeks and I've heard numerous times before that when it rains it pours but yet that still doesn't seem to account for what happened to April Epner (Helen Hunt). A mere ten months into her marriage to Ben (Matthew Broderick), he decides he made a huge mistake. The next day, she goes to work, a school where she and Ben both taught to primary students, to find that he never showed up and is nowhere to be found. Within the week that follows, her adopted mother (Lynn Cohen) dies and her birth mother (Bette Midler) makes contact with her for the first time. It's no wonder the bags under April's eyes are so heavy.

Hunt's directorial debut, THEN SHE FOUND ME, begins so tragically but attempts then to lighten the mood with awkward comedy and untimely romance. The combination is a bizarre contradiction that just falls flat. It doesn't feel right to laugh just yet as there hasn't been time to mourn but we don't want to mourn either as we only just met these folks. We don't know how to feel or where to go and neither does the direction of the film. When the dust from April's disastrous week finally begins to settle, the film finally begins to breathe normally again and finds a particular charm in its decidedly neurotic voice. Still, it is more unsettling than it is satisfying.

While Hunt may be overly sentimental as a director, she finds a certain harshness in her acting style that becomes the film's most unifying source. As put upon as she is at this juncture in her life, she manages to juggle everything reasonably well by balancing between protecting herself, demanding what she deserves and allowing her defenses down at just the right moments and only to those who deserve entry. The woman deserves happiness, be that in the form of a new love with troubled suitor, Frank (Colin Firth), or by realizing her longtime desire to have a child, but her life only gets continuously more complicated, sometimes by her own doing. I would ordinarily want to hug someone in April's position but mostly I just wanted to shake her.

What ultimately undermines THEN SHE FOUND ME is its own air of self-loathing. Hunt spends so much time trying to incite sympathy for April by dumping so many hard realities on to her at once but then punishes her when all she has done is try to keep her head above water. It's hard to feel love for a face on the screen when the woman who put her there hasn't made up her mind herself.

In a featurette on the DVD release version of THEN SHE FOUND ME writer (with Alice Arlen and Victor Levin) /producer/director Helen Hunt shares a ten year journey to have a film made of a novel by Elinor Lipman. Her cast shares in the very sentimental story of Hunt's devotion and seemingly endless charisma and abilities. The explanation for making this budget film are in many ways more successful than the film, a work the cast seems determined to classify as a comedy but a work that is far more a human drama.

April Epner (Helen Hunt) is married to fellow schoolteacher Ben Green (Matthew Broderick) and longs to have a baby before her advancing age prevents her dream. April was adopted as an infant by a Jewish couple who subsequently gave birth to April's brother Freddy (Ben Shenkman): April has always longed to have been Freddy's biological equal, wondering what it would feel like NOT to be adopted. April's busy life implodes: Ben has decided he doesn't like his life and leaves April, April's mother dies, April meets Frank (Colin Firth) a recently divorced writer and father of two children, and April is contacted by a man who can put April in touch with her birth mother - popular TV talk show hostess Bernice Graves (Bette Midler). And if these turns of events weren't traumatic enough, April discovers that she has become pregnant by Ben and Ben is unsure whether he can handle the restructuring of his life to accommodate April. Cautiously April and Frank begin a rather tenuous courtship which is almost immediately threatened by April's discovery of her pregnant state. April and Bernice meet, exchange backgrounds, and make pacts to test their biologic relationship. How each of these characters makes promises that eventually damage each other and then resolve in unexpected ways becomes a study of the meaning of love and compassion among fragile human beings.

While not a satisfying story on every level and a film too cluttered with inconvenient editing choices, the cast is strong and obviously committed, and the story (neither a comedy or a drama but a mixture of the two) tests credibility. But there are some fine moments and the lessons in human behavior are worth examining. Not a great movie but a strong little small budget film. Grady Harp