Then she found me

By Josh Bell

Thursday, May 22, 2008 | 1:58 p.m.

Helen Hunt has spent the last seven years almost entirely absent from movie theaters, devoting most of her time to appearing in plays and putting together her long-in-development passion project Then She Found Me. While Hunt’s screen hiatus has been entirely welcome, Then She Found Me certainly doesn’t come off like the kind of thing worth putting years of one’s life into, and is probably about as enjoyable as any three disposable romantic comedies that Hunt could have worked on instead.

At least the movie endeavors to create a meaty, complex leading role for a woman over 40, with Hunt playing schoolteacher April Epner, reeling after the double shocks of her husband (Broderick) leaving her and her adoptive mother passing away. She’s barely had time to process these tragedies when two people come into her life and uproot it all over again. First, she finds herself falling quickly in love with Frank (Firth), the father of one of her students; then, she’s contacted by the biological mother she never knew, a talk show host named Bernice Graves (Midler).

Although Hunt demonstrated a tendency toward shrill overemoting in her undeservedly Oscar-winning role in 1997’s As Good as It Gets, she mostly reins herself in here, bursting into tears relatively subtly whenever the script calls for it (which, of course, is often). As director, co-writer and co-producer as well as star, Hunt is pretty much the whole show, and proves herself adept at ripping off mentor James L. Brooks, co-writer and director of As Good as It Gets and king of the upper-middle-class serio-comic weepie (Broadcast News, Terms of Endearment, Spanglish).

Hunt is still too cold and prickly to make much of a sympathetic protagonist, though, and the supporting cast doesn’t do her any favors. Firth plays his standard-issue sensitive-guy role, while Midler seems to be acting in another movie altogether, reading her lines like she’s delivering jokes to her audience at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace. Her brassy, hammy performance actually ends up being the best thing about Then She Found Me, but even she can’t redeem it from terminal Lifetime-movie-dom.