Then She Found Me
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| Then She Found Me | |
|---|---|
 Original Poster |
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| Directed by | Helen Hunt |
| Produced by | Helen Hunt |
| Written by | Elinor Lipman (novel) Helen Hunt Alice Arlen Victor Levin |
| Starring | Helen Hunt Colin Firth Bette Midler Matthew Broderick Lynn Cohen Ben Shenkman |
| Music by | David Mansfield |
| Cinematography | Peter Donahue |
| Editing by | Pam Wise |
| Distributed by | THINKFilm (USA) |
| Release date(s) | September 7, 2007 (Toronto Film Festival) |
| Running time | 100 min. |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $3,500,000 (estimated) |
| IMDb profile | |
Then She Found Me is a 2007 film, directed and starring Helen Hunt, that was adapted from a 1990 novel by Elinor Lipman. The film was released in Canada in 2007 and in the United States in 2008. It is Hunt's directorial debut.[1]
The film also stars Colin Firth, Bette Midler and Matthew Broderick. Famed writer Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, appears in a cameo role as a gynecologist.
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[edit] Plot Summary
April (Helen Hunt) is a 39 year-old schoolteacher whose life is changing rapidly as the movie begins. First her husband Ben (Matthew Broderick) abruptly leaves her, then her adoptive mother passes away.
Into her life steps her birth mother Bernice (Bette Midler), who had abandoned her when she was an infant. Bernice is suddenly anxious to get to know her long-lost daughter. April resists the idea, annoyed that she was abandoned.
Bernice, an exuberant woman with her own TV talk show, initially claims that April was fathered by Steve McQueen. This turns out not to be true. While her relationship with Bernice develops, April struggles to reconcile her lingering feelings toward her husband with a new man in her life, the father of one of her students, Frank (Colin Firth).
The situation is complicated when April has a brief affair with Ben while seeing Frank (and pregnant with Ben's child at this stage) Frank reacts to this with anger, and they split up. April has always wanted a child, and had been counselled by her adoptive mother to adopt a child.
The plot is resolved as April works through her feelings toward Ben and Frank.
[edit] Movie Versus Book
The movie is distinctly different from the book which inspired it, although some of the themes remain the same. In the novel, April was single, not divorced. Her love interest is not the father of a student but the also-single school librarian. The biological clock was not an overriding issue. Her adoptive parents were both Holocaust survivors.
