Then She Found ME

My week end were very quite , since the weather were awful on saturday, we Decided to make it Movie night, so My Lovely Husband decided to let me choose the films, so my choice were of course not action, I decided to Begin with “Then She Found Me,” a serious comedy, is more impressive for what it refuses to do than for its accomplishment.

Cast: Helen Hunt, Bette Midler, Colin Firth, Matthew Broderick, and Ben Shankman.

Directed by: Helen Hunt

The directorial debut of Helen Hunt, who plays April Epner, an anxious 39-year-old kindergarten teacher in New York City, it has all the ingredients of a slick, commercial farce, which it emphatically is not.

In fact, the movie, based on a novel by Elinor Lipman, has enough material for two such farces.

In one, a childless mother obsessed with her ticking biological clock becomes pregnant after clumsy breakup sex with her husband of less than a week. (Her obstetrician is played by, of all people, Salman Rushdie.)

In the other, a woman who has just lost her adoptive mother is suddenly besieged by a garrulous local talk-show personality who claims to be her biological mother.

The movie is unusually sensitive to the anxieties around adoption. Shortly before her death, April’s ailing mother (Lynn Cohen) argues that there is no difference between raising an adopted child and one of your own; her daughter should cease fretting and adopt a Chinese baby, she declares. April’s vehement refusal to consider the possibility rings as a tacit insult to her mother’s parenting skills, but the simmering conflict is never brought into the open, its really touching scene,
but most of the film's conversations play out like this: 'Why don't you just adopt?' I'm not adopting a baby from China !' There's not much more depth to the discussions than that, which is a shame – adoption is an issue that's not exactly over-discussed these days..............

Ms. Hunt emphasizes her characters’ various shades of Jewishness. April doesn’t seem especially religious, but in the opening scene she goes through a Jewish wedding ceremony with her childish husband, Ben (Matthew Broderick), who goes to live with his mother after their breakup. “Then She Found Me” also clearly indicates that the characters’ lifestyles are not unrealistically comfortable.

All the stars, including Ms. Hunt, are pointedly deglamorized. April, alarmingly gaunt, with straining neck tendons, appears to wear little or no makeup. As her biological mother, Bernice Graves, Bette Midler is a blowsy, plump loudmouth and bottle redhead whose obsequious behavior makes much of what she says sound false. Indeed some of it is. In her first of several lies, she claims that April was conceived in a delirious one-night stand with Steve McQueen and relinquished for adoption after three days.

April’s would-be romantic savior, Frank (Colin Firth), the recently divorced father of two children (one is April’s pupil), looks as if he is going to seed. Spluttering, neurotic and hot-tempered, he has all the romantic promise of an over-the-hill Lancelot astride a tottering nag. Frank also lives in a seedy suburban neighborhood far from any center of action.

Mr. Broderick’s Ben is a bloated, inarticulate man-child. His two awkward sex scenes with Ms. Hunt (one in the back seat of a car) are desperate, joyless quickies that involve minimal undressing and leave April confused and Ben apologetic.

Mr. Firth’s Frank is hyper-emotional to a degree rarely seen in male characters in mainstream movies. When Frank gets upset, which is frequently, his face reddens, he bluntly speaks his mind and he often excuses himself to go for a walk and let off steam.

Ms. Midler’s Bernice is a credible portrait of a narcissistic drama queen with a good heart beneath her celebrity bluster.

Connections between the characters deepen in spite of misunderstandings and obstacles. After April and Frank acknowledge their mutual attraction, their wary courtship proceeds in fits and starts, but they keep at it. Life isn’t easy for April as she muddles along, but you feel she is headed in the right direction. also one of the affecting 2 Scenes with her real mother, Bernice when she is confronting to her a lie......... another one, when she help her to get her baby and she ask helen why don't u pray, as she prays before eating....................also affecting one

well it's thinking film