'Then She Found Me': Yearning for the Mother Lode

The etymological roots of "chick flick" aren't quite clear, but it's generally not a complimentary term. Sentiment. Bonding. Moral transformation. Characters getting in touch with their inner Joan Crawford. What self-respecting movie needs that?

Well . . . "Iron Man" comes to mind.

So does the decidedly unsuperhero movie "Then She Found Me," directed by and starring actress Helen Hunt. It's definitely a chick flick, in the sense that its engine is inextricably female -- not in that vacuous, glossy ad-agency fashion, but in ways that are messy, complicated and contradictory. Hunt's character, April Epner, is a 39-year-old schoolteacher whose biological clock is clouding her judgment. As the film begins, the desperate-for-a-baby April is marrying Ben, the figurative boy-next-door (he teaches in the next classroom), and a male of the classic mother-fixated variety. He may have a spine of Silly Putty, but he's got otherwise workable parts. So, like anything done for the wrong reasons, there's an implicit doom hanging over the nuptials: When the couple flees the reception for an amusement park -- to ride the bumper cars -- it's an obvious move by director Hunt, but grimly funny, nonetheless.

April's not just yearning for a child, she wants to produce one herself -- she was adopted, and it weighs on her, something she makes clear both to her brother (Ben Shenkman) and her ailing mother (Lynn Cohen), despite the way it makes them feel. This doesn't cast April as very likable -- but certainly human. The movie knows that what makes us tick is usually a rococo mechanism of impressions, experience and wisdom, like a Swiss watch after a few laps around the Cuisinart.

And then . . . the domestic effluence hits the rotary appliance: Mom dies. Ben (Matthew Broderick) leaves. And local TV celebrity Bernice Graves (Bette Midler), a one-woman version of "The View," materializes to announce that she is April's biological mother. In the midst of all this, Frank (Colin Firth), one of April's school dads -- and one whose wife has abandoned him and their two children -- starts lighting up April's life like Debby Boone.

Hunt directs a lot of "Then She Found Me," her feature debut, like a TV movie, and the music by the estimable David Mansfield is used to frog-march the film's emotional content, rather than letting it simply enhance the proceedings. But the Hunt-Alice Arlen-Victor Levin screenplay contains that rare quality, nuance, and the actors respond. Hunt plays April with all the native emotional recoil that an attractive, intelligent, 39-year-old-and-unmarried woman might possess. Midler's Bernice, although occasionally beaming in from some other movie, if not planet, has the perspective on others' emotional pain of someone whose entire worldview had been formed by daytime TV. And Firth, who pretty much steals the movie from the women, is sensitive, is handsome in a rumpled-dad way and plays his scenes with an armory of rapier emotions.

In her way, April is symbolic not just of late-inning maternal mania -- she looks thin, even gaunt, as if she's been worrying away her nights, afraid of becoming irrelevant -- but of Hollywood womanhood itself. Consider Hunt: Even before the conclusion of the highly successful "Mad About You" she was becoming unavoidable. "Twister." "As Good as It Gets." In 2000 alone, she appeared in "Dr. T and the Women," "Pay It Forward," "Cast Away" and "What Women Want." Then, a slow fade. What she did in her downtime, as it were, was have a baby.

Films by first-timers are often a crapshoot, occasionally an indulgence; films directed by actors often seem to be something they needed to get out of their system, to become the conductor rather than the violin. Neither is true of "Then She Found Me," which suffers from, if anything, a lack of pure confidence in the story, the actors or the audience. But any crowds going to see "Then She Found Me" (a title with multiple meanings, it turns out) won't need quite the number of clues about how they're supposed to be feeling. They'll know. And a lot better, and a lot sooner, than April Epner.

Then She Found Me (100 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for sexual content and vulgarity.