"Then She Found Me" is a wretched movie, and it should not be. The talent here is undeniable: Helen Hunt, Colin Firth, Matthew Broderick, Bette Midler. The problem? An unforgivably awful script. Can anyone in Hollywood read? Hollywood is a world capital of entertainment, of magic; there is so much talent there. And yet, year after year, these awful scripts are greenlighted and talented writers starve. What gives?
The main character, April Epner (Helen Hunt) is never fleshed out. What we do know about her makes her incredibly unappealing. She's obsessed with her plump, middle-aged, boy-man husband (Broderick) who has left her to live in his mother's house. April is shrill and rude to her dying mother. She's manipulative and callow in her interactions with Colin Firth, the man all sensible women love and would treat like the treasure he is. In a particularly painful scene, Frank (Firth) makes a poignant confession of love to April, and she blows him off in order to gripe to her husband in a cell phone call. I was literally shouting at the screen, "Run, Colin, run! Get away from this nasty loser female as fast as ever you can!" It doesn't stop there. April attempts to have a quickie with her husband in the back seat of a car. On a busy city street. In broad daylight. With the car door open. It was such an ugly, gratuitous scene. It marked April as someone suffering from borderline personality disorder. But it doesn't stop there. April casually invites both her husband and her boyfriend to her gynecologist's office for an exam, in stirrups and johnny coat, to ascertain that she is pregnant, by her husband. WHY should we care about this woman? Why should Colin Firth be attracted to her? What inspired his poignant love confession? Nothing. There is nothing on screen, nothing in the script, that ever fleshes his attraction out.
Speaking of "flesh"
if you read comments here or on the web, you can see that most viewers were fixated on how haggard Helen Hunt looks. She is very thin, and time has not been kind to her face. In some scenes, it is impossible to look at her and not want to sit her down and get some food into her, she looks that much like a refugee from some catastrophe. Some viewers applauded Hunt for being "brave" and allowing the camera access, but focusing on Helen Hunt's courage utterly detracts from ever registering April Epner as a flesh and blood human being. You're not thinking about April Epner, you're thinking, "Hmm
how could Helen Hunt change her look?" Similarly, Bette Midler is never convincing as the character she is playing. She is always Bette Midler, bodacious saloon singer, breezing through a film with a script that is decidedly unworthy of any attempt on her part to bother to pretend to be anyone but Bette Midler.
Failed films like this are so painful because there are so few movies made for women over forty. The glory days that could produce a script like Mankiewicz's "All About Eve" are long behind us. Drek like this make us miss classics like that all the more. Older women do lead interesting lives. There are so many real questions that this film could have explored for a forty-plus schoolteacher whose husband wants to leave her. This film ignored all of those real questions and just plopped Colin Firth, the perfect man, and Bette Midler, STAR, in as phony, bogus attempts to stir up some kind of a plot. Sorry without writing talent and insight, which this script utterly lacks even starpower like Firth's and Middler's can't create a worthy film.
