Dreary 'Found Me' wanders aimlessly

(C) What's wrong with Helen Hunt's appearance in Then She Found Me is not that she looks terrible -- pinched emotionally as well as physically -- but that Colin Firth keeps telling her she looks wonderful. And even a Firth who's deliberately sloppy (as he is here) is not the kind of man to lose his head in love that easily.

In this New York cheer-and-tearjerker, Firth plays a guy at loose ends raising two kids by writing book-flap copy, and Hunt plays a schoolteacher aching for a baby. At the beginning, Hunt marries a friend and fellow teacher ( Matthew Broderick), who is too big a baby himself to last a year with her.

As performers, Hunt and Broderick are fatally well-matched. They get the movie off to a foul start from which it never fully recovers; indeed, it plummets whenever the heroine shares emotional and erotic confusion with her abysmal, estranged husband when she should be settling down with Firth.

In the long-running TV series Mad About You, Hunt had the rare ability to be calmly funny, just as Broderick, in every film he made from Max Dugan Returns and WarGames (both 1983) to Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) to The Freshman (1990), could express a hilarious game innocence or mischievousness without screwing up his face or saying a word; he had an elfin luster.

But they've done the opposite of performers who mellow gracefully: They've grown self-conscious with age. Hunt has never been at ease on the big screen. Even in her Oscar-winning role in As Good As It Gets (1997), she poured on the angst and let all her sweat show. Broderick has continued to give wonderful performances, but his reservoir of joy has seeped away, and joyless parts bring out something small and irritating -- mite-like -- in his character.

In Then She Found Me, you worry about the malaise these two teachers inflict on their students. The cryptically fed-up husband tells his driven wife that he can't take their life together any more. You wonder what he's referring to: Her obsession with having a baby? They then engage in hot remorseful sex that's only the second worst love-making scene in the movie.

As the director and co-writer of this adaptation of an Elinor Lipman novel, Hunt may think she's exploring the swirling emotional landscapes found in every woman's intimate and family life. But the shallowness of the characters and the brittleness of the dialogue defeat her attempts at depth and fluidity.

The way it comes out, all she's done is locate -- and then only intermittently -- the strangled laughter in some interconnected sob stories. Hunt's character is adopted -- that's why she insists on trying to have her own baby. ( Salman Rushdie plays her obstetrician.) Just when she's dealing with divorce, disappointment and a possible new man (Firth), Bette Midler shows up as her real mom -- a Manhattan talk-show host -- who's tracked her down.

This mother keeps tripping up her chances of turning her birth daughter into family by telling one whopper after another. (The silliest, and most appealing, is that the teacher's biological father was Steve McQueen.) Midler plays an extrovert with heart and brains, but the twists and turnarounds in this mother-and-child reunion arrive right on schedule; in the end, she's less a mother than a show-biz fairy godmother.

Firth is manfully wise and expansive as a fellow who helps his lover see that you can glean the truth from people too nervous or confused to deliver it straight. But he can't energize this movie's base because he can't make you buy its core relationship. This whole movie has zero chemistry. Broderick and Hunt are a match made in hell; Firth and Hunt are a match made in limbo.

>>>Then She Found Me (ThinkFilm) Starring Helen Hunt, Colin Firth, Bette Midler, Matthew Broderick. Directed by Hunt. Rated R for language and some sexual content. Time 100 minutes.

michael.sragow@baltsun.com

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