Film Roundup ~ Then She Found Me

2007. Director Helen Hunt. Starring Helen Hunt, Colin Frith, Mathew Broderick, Bette Midler.

‘B-side & Rarities’ albums are usually split down the line between songs that are fantastic & baffling as to how the band overlooked them for wider exposure, and those that, to use a Q/Mojo album review staple: “are B-sides for a reason”.

The same divide can probably be used for ‘Films bought in CEX, used and costing less-than-£3’, some are great and a really good discovery – whilst some are, um, ‘pre-owned for a reason’.

This, apparently Helen Hunt’s directorial debut, is firmly in the latter camp. It’s not quite an absolute atrocity, but .....well, if a case can be made that Bette Midler gives the most consistent, realistic to a point, role....then you have to worry.

It starts off at breakneck pace, with plotlines coming in from right, left and centre, but none of them are given any lasting attention at all or appropriate focus.


Having seen the whole film, one of the opening scenes is a microcosm of the bigger picture: Mathew Broderick is home, waiting for his wife to get in from work (it turns out they work together, it seems like in a uni, but it’s not, it’s a junior school) pondering the best way to confess he’s had an affair with another teacher in the same corridor, at the same school (this is never mentioned again), Helen Hunt comes in, somehow manages in about five seconds to change and put on lingerie under her work coat, and brace herself to reluctantly hear his confession of infidelity.

They then have sex on a table, he gets up and – I might have got this wrong, but I’m sure this is what happens – gets a bag and says “I’ll see you at work”. But its dark and she’s just come home from work. And they work together remember. But ‘the next day’, there’s no sign of him, leaving the class he’s teaching to merge into her puipils, casuing uproar. All very hectic.

A recurring fault is that you don’t really get any clear sense of how long this rift - or anything else - has been brewing: you see them get married, “ten months” is bandied about as to how long they’d been together when he decides he “doesn’t want this life”, but it’s difficult to ascertain whether the film is set over, say, a couple of years – or a month or so.

Helen Hunt is still somewhat baffled – and fair play to her, as director she shows no vanity in filming her character, there’s only one scene where she looks anything better than dishevelled, super-stressed and gaunt – by the speed of events, when she in the maelstrom of the two groups of young kids being put together, sets eyes on Colin Firth, there to drop one of his two children off.

In another line that could be used against the entire film as indictment and evidence of it trying to pile in as much ‘intrigue’ as possible she fends him off by saying “I split up with my husband nine hours ago! Can you control yourself for five minutes!?” Well, quite.

The pattern of the film ends up being like an unsatisfying 50 over cricket innings – gung-ho, hectic start with hit-and-miss “big shots” and then a reprise of the frenzied action at the end where everything simply must have a conclusion within the fixed timeframe, but with a meandering, attention diverting miss-mash in between. Uneven and unfulfilling.

To ramble on, something like Reds on the other hand would be a good Test match, flowing and steady. Periods of drift, very lengthy, no rush, an audience unfriendly interval, and after all this, an unclear, slightly unsatisfactory result. 5 Days for a draw. Colin Frith, incidentally, could play Andrew Strauss , easily. No idea what the plot would be. But the role is his for the taking.
Sage reminder of the up-and-down fortunes of actors provided by Firth in this film too. It’s an almost self-parodic role as a love-lorn, hard-done-by, neurotic English gentleman. He certainly seems an awful long way from an Oscar-winning comeback three years hence in his worryingly moist-eyed, fanatical, choked-throat declaration of admiration to Hunt in his interview on the DVD extras.

In keeping with the baffling tone of the whole project, these bonus-features strike totally the wrong note; Helen Hunt unwisely draws attention to the fact that this was ten years in the making, Firth is on the brink of tears as he salutes the project's bravery, beauty and brilliance – and Broderick leads people to believe its a laugh-a-minute comedy in which he has more than three scenes (0ne of which, admittedly, does have a decent if generic joke).....bizarre.

> Within the first ten minutes there’s been a wedding, an affair, a passionate reunion, a job crisis, the beginning of another affair, a funeral (her adoptive mum dies), and then a reconciliation with her blood mother – once more, indecently rushed through: a messenger arrives at the school whilst Helen is still poking herself frantically in the f’head to try to fathom her first encounter with this 'frosty but cute' single-dad...next scene we’re in a restaurant for the meeting.

This introduces Bette Midler, playing a caricatured, loud-mouth, sex-pot US chatshow host. Hopefully that will put my early mention of her being the solidest character into context- nuanced it aint – but it is reasonably amusing in its own way.

One of the review comments I’ve seen says “Hunt knows when to rein in the Divine Miss M instead of allowing her to go into full Kabuki mode”, which as well as being one of the campest things ever committed to record, is with all due respect, total bollocks. It is a very OTT performance but it is believable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RoSgwt6mcc This is the trailer <. It basically covers everything (and more, there are very important bits that are alluded to here that are skipped over pretty much without mention in the actual final cut). And what it covers is a a total miss-mash, with potentially intriguing angles (the re-attraction and pull of her husband, the adopted child v natural child battle for love) being briefly brushed over whilst anodyne filler (Colin Firth’s insomnia, the main character’s religious doubts) being relatively dwelt on and indulged. The nadir is probably the scene two-thirds through when Frith, on discovering she’s briefly returned to her husband (via a very lazy plot/prop device), gives his essay at Clive Owen’s infamously sour rant at Julia Roberts in Closer – ending by saying he hopes she loses her baby (she does, unfathomably informed of the miscarriage by a cameo-ing Salman Rushdie as a doctor...) and that his own kids can “go fuck themselves”. It’s a limp tirade, and fittingly, is totally ignored as they end up together at the end anyway, although (as queried before) whether these multiple U-Turns have happened over a reasonable period or (as it seems) a couple of weeks is difficult to grasp. And its clumsily thrown in at the very end that they've adopted a Chinese girl. Of course.
Plus points; it is original, can’t think of anything it’s lifting from, and the mix of stars is ...it doesn’t work but....the casting is intriguing.
Overall, it is just not a good film – but worse, it becomes infuriatingly bad quite often.
Look out for it in a second hand shop near you soon!
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