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Gaunt, grim and wound as tight as a ukulele's string, April Epner (Helen Hunt), the elementary school teacher undergoing the mother of all midlife crises in "Then She Found Me," is a stern challenge to an audience's collective sympathy.
We feel her pain, nonetheless, when, in swift succession, her adoptive mother dies, her Peter Pan husband (Matthew Broderick) abandons her for another woman and, out of the blue, her real mother (Bette Midler) turns out to be narcissistic talk-show queen Bernice Graves, who claims April is the fruit of a one-night stand with Steve McQueen.
That's enough screwball complexity for a season-long sitcom, though sitcom veteran Hunt (star, with Paul Reiser, of TV's long running "Mad About You"), making her feature directorial debut here, is after something deeper and more challenging. She starts by making April difficult to like, especially in her brittle engagement with Bernice and her cautious conversations with Frank Harte (Colin Firth), a divorced dad of one of April's students and an earnest, willing bridge over the schoolmarm's troubled waters.
Hunt's touch behind the camera is sometimes as severe as her demeanor in front of it, though she can do some very nice things, especially within the intimate surroundings where her actors flourish. It's gratifying to see Midler carry out such a polished, nuanced comedic turn, while Firth's very agreeable combination of stoic grace and wiry moodiness almost steals the show.
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