Then She Found Me

"Don't be glib with me!" declares a case in Helen Hunt's ticking-biological-clock panic comedy Then She Found Me, and it's too bad Hunt didn't take her character's advice in the shaping of the plastic film. For to the highest degree of its running time, Then She Found Me stays safely within television sitcom glibness, the edges softened and motivations rigged into television coincidence and artificiality. It's Mad About You with home maternity test swabs.


Hunt is April Epner, a 39-year-old school teacher, married to Ben (Matthew Broderick), the puffy, neighborhood schlub. April is childless and longs for "a baby that is truly hers." Being an adoptive daughter in a closely knit Jewish family (she envies Ben Shenkman's Freddy, the biological family brother), she wants the biological connexion of a birth child. As the film begins, her female parent Trudy (Lynn Cohen) is in the hospital, her father has died, and April's comfortable world is about to explode. Things go wrong from the get-go when April, haunted with getting pregnant, greets Ben at home with a gown under her coat, aegir for a surprise tumble. But Ben tops her by announcing his determination to leave their months old marriage. Things stay falling apart -- April juggling the death of Trudy, having an thing with the embittered, divorced Frank (Colin Firth), and -- to top it all off -- the sudden appearance of April's biological mother, Bernice Graves, a brazen-faced, unpretentious loudmouth and local talk-show hostess, played by Bette Midler (who else?).


There are material emotional issues churning in Then She Found Me, and the film could easily have been reconstituted as a melodramatic weeper. But Hunt keeps the pace breezy and light, mining the situations and hitting the all the laugh cues like a post-millennial Gene Saks or Herb Ross. When April tells Frank, "I pauperization to sleep -- it's not departure to draw any worse than this," Hunt cuts to Trudy's funeral. A running gag features Hunt in her obstetrician's waiting room accompanied with various boyfriends and close relatives. You canful almost check off the joke beats on a scorecard.


At sure points, Hunt pushes beyond the post comedy superficiality by having her characters break into impassioned outbursts --Frank circumstantially screams at April, Ben bursts into tears, April herself breaks down and weeps. But this is never enough to rupture the wooden-headed comedy skin drawn over the film like the casing of a kettledrum.


Hunt tries break loose and demystifies herself by coming into court gaunt and without constitution, looking very convincingly like a worn out 40-year old -- her shamed expression for most of the plastic film resembling something out of a Kurosawa drama than a babe comedy. But even then, Hunt can't resist a smiling clam up (in a bumper machine, even) and cute falling-in-love babble ("I sometimes make toast and tea afterwards I brush my teeth and then I don't brush them anymore.").


One would figure the one thing that would tip the film over the edge would be the entrance of Midler. Surprisingly, the Midler in Then She Found Me is a quieter, gentler Midler. And, although there are lines in the film that seem to be written specifically for The Divine Ms. M, Midler invests Bernice with a tragic undertone that she squeezes out of the screenplay like tears from a damp handkerchief.


Perhaps the most pleasing look of the film is Hunt's depiction of a Jewish family at repose with their faith (and without caustic remark). Before an artificial insemination scene in the obstetrician's office, April and her attendants casually pause for a moment of Jewish prayer and in its connection and communion among the characters, it is the most affecting here and now in Then She Found Me. It also makes one bury that Salman Rushdie, in a gaga bit of comic stunt casting, plays the obstetrician.


There are hints here that Helen Hunt could, perchance, chomp down on a good cinematic meal. If only she would give birth to herself as a film producer and cut the umbilical cord cord attaching her to the womblike safety of the situation comedy formula, then her following movie volition be something to see.




Wait'll you hear what we found following.