The Prague Post
December 1st, 2008
Endowment Fund     Business Listings ONLINE      Reservations      Classifieds    Subscriptions
Hotel Prague Centre

Home » Archives » Night & Day

Labor and love

An Oscar-winning actor takes to the director's chair
Cinema Review | Search restaurants | Archives

By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
August 13th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Love and pain and the whole damn thing. Firth and Hunt in Hunt's new film.
Then She Found Me


Directed by Helen Hunt
With Helen Hunt, Colin Firth, Bette Midler, Matthew Broderick, Lynn Cohen and Ben Shenkman

Helen Hunt’s first outing as a film director (she has directed television) is one of those true labors of love. Then She Found Me, based on a novel by Elinor Lipman, took 10 years to reach the screen, as Hunt found that she couldn’t get any backing based on the film’s first few scripts (which hewed closely to Lipman’s book). It was only after she and her writers veered wildly away from the source novel that some interest was shown (Lipman’s readers have been contemptuous of the changes, though the author herself has been supportive).
This quiet, slightly uneven film could also be seen as a labor of love for Hunt’s career, which, at least on screen, has stalled. Though she appears frequently on the New York stage, Hunt is an actress deserving of more film work than she’s getting. In the 10 years since she won an Oscar for As Good as It Gets, Hunt first appeared in two box office successes from 2000, Cast Away and What a Woman Wants, after which she was consigned to forgettable projects. There was Woody Allen’s sweet, if slight Curse of the Jade Scorpion from 2001 (the same year that her performance in One Night at McCool’s wound up on the cutting room floor); a mechanical costumer, A Good Woman, based on Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan; and, more recently, a brief stint in Emilio Estevez’s worthy, though overwrought, Bobby.
If you look up Hunt’s name on IMDB (the Internet Movie Database), you’ll find that she isn’t, at present, part of any future film projects. By comparison, her two male co-stars, Colin Firth and Matthew Broderick, are busily employed into the next decade. Broderick has three films in post-production, while Firth is involved in five forthcoming films. The three actors are approximately the same age, yet the one fighting for a career is the Oscar-winner — and a woman.
It’s the old Hollywood story for female stars over 40: Their male peers continue on into gray eminence, while they are left scrambling (Meryl Streep is the exception that proves the rule, just as Katharine Hepburn was before her. Hepburn was never reduced to making hagsploitation horrors like Davis, Crawford and de Havilland).
Then She Found Me contains a similar plight for a woman nearing the dreaded 40 cut-off: the biological imperative to reproduce before it’s too late. Hunt plays April Epner, a daycare teacher who’s had no luck with relationships. She makes the mistake, understandably in her desperation, of marrying an old friend, Ben (Matthew Broderick). He turns out to be both feckless and gormless, a man-boy incapable of cutting himself free from his mother’s apron strings. When he runs back to mommy after a few panicked weeks of marriage, April arrives at his mother’s house to sarcastically ask if he can “come out and play.”
The torture of possessing a deep, maternal instinct while constantly surrounded by children, none of whom is your own, is not the only thing prodding April. She herself was an adopted child. While her adoptive mother (the wonderful character actor Lynn Cohen) tried her best to make April feel as much a part of the Epner family as her own natural son, Freddy (Ben Shenkman), April always felt like an outsider. After her adoptive mother’s death, April receives a summons to meet her long-lost biological mother. If she felt that she was vastly different from the recently deceased Trudy Epner, April is in for a shock when she meets daytime television celebrity Bernice Graves (Bette Midler).
Forced to process the unexpected eruption of Bernice in her life is consuming enough. But then April finds herself falling in love with a mature, stable man, Frank (Colin Firth). Soon after, she discovers that she’s finally pregnant — though the timing might point toward the nebishy Ben rather than the dashing Frank.
What’s winning about this film is Hunt’s insistence that her character is going to make some stupid choices. A few of April’s decisions are so horribly wrong that we almost feel like angrily consigning her to her fate. But that emotional response arises because Hunt has fully crafted a flesh-and-blood person who is as rash and vulnerable as the rest of us are at times. Our frustration with April for allowing Ben back into her life, however briefly, stems from the fact that Hunt has made us deeply care for this woman.    
The performances in Then She Found Me are all similarly honed. Midler occasionally totters toward becoming the Divine Miss M., but pulls back in time to keep her personality from stealing the screen. Broderick, a limited actor who has never shed his baby fat, is perfect as the stunted Ben, while Firth is his usual solid self. The supporting cast is equally strong, including a few strange little cameos, such as writer Salman Rushdie popping up to play April’s obstetrician.
This small film has had a number of distribution disappointments Stateside, so it’s a nice surprise that it’s made its way to Europe, where it might actually get the attention it deserves. If nothing else, it certainly proves that Helen Hunt will go down fighting on the Hollywood scrap heap.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (13/08/2008):

Browse the Current Issue

If you enjoyed this article, why don't you subscribe to the print version!
We accept secure online transactions provided by PayPal and Moneybookers

Be the first to add a comment!


Full Name: *
City: *
E-mail: **
This comment can be published in the print version of The Prague Post
Enter the text on the right:
 visual captcha
Comment: *
* Required field. In order to be approved for display, comments must have a first and last name and a city.
** E-mails are required and will only be used for internal purposes.

Most visited in Business Listings

Provokator
Hotel booking
The Prague Post Online contains a selection of articles that have been printed in
The Prague Post, a weekly newspaper published in the Czech Republic.
To subscribe to the print paper, click here.
Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.