The Huntiad
Helen Hunt presents Helen Hunt in a Helen Hunt film by Helen Hunt, and the result is...not as brain-scrapingly awful as it might have been, honestly. Not that there is any universe in which Then She Found Me counts as an artistic success, but in this universe, at least, it certainly isn't the nightmare of self-indulgent terrors that "Helen Hunt makes her directorial debut in a film which sees her play a New York schoolteacher dealing with divorce, pregnancy and the unexpected appearance of her birth mother" has every right to be.
Hunt plays Alice Epner, a New York schoolteacher dealing with... whoa, déjà vu there. Anyhow, Alice's husband is Ben (Matthew Broderick), an inordinately emotionally crippled fellow of indelible sexual magnetism. The day he leaves her (for entirely vague reasons) is the day before her adopted mother passes away, which is all the reason that her birth mother, local infotainment personality Bernice Graves (Bette Midler), needs to come find her. And right around this time, she starts to fall in love with Frank (Colin Firth), the practically perfect father of one of her students.
The script, co-adapted by Hunt, Alice Arlen and Victor Levin from Elinor Lipman's novel, strives for pathos and comedy and warmth, and perhaps as a script it might even achieve those things. As a movie, it is none of them; it is a grim, grey little affair of people who aren't interesting failing to achieve catharsis in the banal, depressing problems of their lives. And by "grey," I am not using a metaphor: Hunt's visual sense is apparently derived entirely from that line of artsy-realist independent movies where everything is grainy and desaturated. It's a somewhat punishing movie to look at, really: it is harsh without being evocative, ugly but not meaningful. Visually, it is one of the most inauspicious debut films for an actor-turned-director in the last handful of years, at least.
Worse still, this particular actor-turned director isn't even very good at guiding her performers (although it does seem to be a common flaw of the directing actor to be excessively poor with other actors - I cannot say why this should be the case). Firth, playing a colorless variation on the customary Colin Firth rom-com character - a Brit who is just so absolutely sensitive and charming, Mr. Darcy adrift in the modern age - is just about the most unpleasant to watch that I have ever seen him. In no small part because he's playing Frank as a bit of a cocksure asshole, and yet Alice (and the audience, allegedly) fall madly in love with him over and over again. Broderick, meanwhile, is on-screen for all of ten minutes and it's absolutely clear that his primary direction was "be immature." Surprisingly, the standout member of the cast, indeed the only real reason to see the movie, is Midler, being exactly who she is, sassy and loud and vulgar, and in so doing bringing the only color that this deeply neutral movie ever experiences. And when Bette Midler is the best thing about your movie, it might be time to think about scrapping it and starting fresh.
As far as the movie is concerned, however, the performance that drives everything is Helen Hunt, running a gamut of emotions that all somehow involve her grimacing. My God, does that woman grimace a lot in Then She Found Me. It ages her something fierce; that would be a lookist thing to say if the movie didn't hinge on the fact that Alice is in her late 30s, while Hunt is in her mid 40s, and Grimacing Hunt looks another five years older. That is, anyway, just one facet of the actress's amazingly toothless presence. Considering the specificity of Alice's character - a woman "of a certain age," a devout Jew, childless without being neurotic, sexually needful without being whorish - and considering how rare almost all of those specific details are in a film climate that favors hot blonde starlets, it's both a little surprising and a lot disappointing that Hunt makes so very little out of her character. She walks around looking slightly pained and annoyed, speaking lines that are almost certainly jokes only it sounds like she's going to cry any moment while delivering them, and killing any emotion by being flawlessly unsympathetic. Helen Hunt's career is fairly littered with middling performances, but even so I was totally unprepared for the sheer pointlessness of her work in this film.
The film is simple and dull and dreadful; it feels like an episode of a mediocre sitcom written and directed by depressed people. But it is not a vanity trainwreck, like many directorial debuts of established stars, and for this I must give the film credit. It has no flavor, but that is a different thing entirely from tasting of awful. Though made without talent or delicacy, it is at least a functional motion picture. I suppose that means that Hunt can probably make another one, though I'd be grateful if she didn't.
4/10
Hunt plays Alice Epner, a New York schoolteacher dealing with... whoa, déjà vu there. Anyhow, Alice's husband is Ben (Matthew Broderick), an inordinately emotionally crippled fellow of indelible sexual magnetism. The day he leaves her (for entirely vague reasons) is the day before her adopted mother passes away, which is all the reason that her birth mother, local infotainment personality Bernice Graves (Bette Midler), needs to come find her. And right around this time, she starts to fall in love with Frank (Colin Firth), the practically perfect father of one of her students.
The script, co-adapted by Hunt, Alice Arlen and Victor Levin from Elinor Lipman's novel, strives for pathos and comedy and warmth, and perhaps as a script it might even achieve those things. As a movie, it is none of them; it is a grim, grey little affair of people who aren't interesting failing to achieve catharsis in the banal, depressing problems of their lives. And by "grey," I am not using a metaphor: Hunt's visual sense is apparently derived entirely from that line of artsy-realist independent movies where everything is grainy and desaturated. It's a somewhat punishing movie to look at, really: it is harsh without being evocative, ugly but not meaningful. Visually, it is one of the most inauspicious debut films for an actor-turned-director in the last handful of years, at least.
Worse still, this particular actor-turned director isn't even very good at guiding her performers (although it does seem to be a common flaw of the directing actor to be excessively poor with other actors - I cannot say why this should be the case). Firth, playing a colorless variation on the customary Colin Firth rom-com character - a Brit who is just so absolutely sensitive and charming, Mr. Darcy adrift in the modern age - is just about the most unpleasant to watch that I have ever seen him. In no small part because he's playing Frank as a bit of a cocksure asshole, and yet Alice (and the audience, allegedly) fall madly in love with him over and over again. Broderick, meanwhile, is on-screen for all of ten minutes and it's absolutely clear that his primary direction was "be immature." Surprisingly, the standout member of the cast, indeed the only real reason to see the movie, is Midler, being exactly who she is, sassy and loud and vulgar, and in so doing bringing the only color that this deeply neutral movie ever experiences. And when Bette Midler is the best thing about your movie, it might be time to think about scrapping it and starting fresh.
As far as the movie is concerned, however, the performance that drives everything is Helen Hunt, running a gamut of emotions that all somehow involve her grimacing. My God, does that woman grimace a lot in Then She Found Me. It ages her something fierce; that would be a lookist thing to say if the movie didn't hinge on the fact that Alice is in her late 30s, while Hunt is in her mid 40s, and Grimacing Hunt looks another five years older. That is, anyway, just one facet of the actress's amazingly toothless presence. Considering the specificity of Alice's character - a woman "of a certain age," a devout Jew, childless without being neurotic, sexually needful without being whorish - and considering how rare almost all of those specific details are in a film climate that favors hot blonde starlets, it's both a little surprising and a lot disappointing that Hunt makes so very little out of her character. She walks around looking slightly pained and annoyed, speaking lines that are almost certainly jokes only it sounds like she's going to cry any moment while delivering them, and killing any emotion by being flawlessly unsympathetic. Helen Hunt's career is fairly littered with middling performances, but even so I was totally unprepared for the sheer pointlessness of her work in this film.
The film is simple and dull and dreadful; it feels like an episode of a mediocre sitcom written and directed by depressed people. But it is not a vanity trainwreck, like many directorial debuts of established stars, and for this I must give the film credit. It has no flavor, but that is a different thing entirely from tasting of awful. Though made without talent or delicacy, it is at least a functional motion picture. I suppose that means that Hunt can probably make another one, though I'd be grateful if she didn't.
4/10
