Then She Found Me (Blu-ray)

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Life isn't scripted. It's often not very neat and tidy, either, and things don't always end happily or tragically. Sometimes, things just happen, and people deal with their situations and go on with their lives. So it's more than refreshing to get an intelligent film for adults that probably gave PR people fits because it's not easily pigeonholed.

"Then She Found Me" certainly doesn't fit the formula of the typical romantic comedy, though a man and a woman are attracted to each other. In fact, make that two men and one woman . . . though you can't say it conforms to the typical romantic triangle structure either. That's because the underlying storyline is a female mid-life crisis, and because there are no instantly recognizable tropes, we can just sit back, appreciate characters that seem more real because of it, and enjoy this smart first feature from Helen Hunt, whose only previous directing experience was four episodes of "Mad About You," the Emmy-winning sitcom she did with Paul Reiser.

In "Then She Found Me" we're introduced to New York schoolteacher April Epner (Hunt), whose classroom is across the hall from Ben Green (Matthew Broderick), a man she marries in a Jewish ceremony. But it's clear that the marriage was a mistake, because one day he just leaves her and goes back to live with his mother. That's not the only thing that precipitates a midlife crisis. Her adoptive mother (Lynn Cohen) dies, leaving her feeling unloved, lost, and ticking as only a woman's biological clock can. It's what made her try one more time to seduce her husband so she could have a baby before he finally decided to call it quits, and it's what makes her gravitate toward a charming Englishman named Frank (Colin Firth), who's the father of one of her students.

But the person who has the most immediate impact on her current life is her birth mother, a flamboyant talk-show host named Bernice Graves (Bette Midler) who turns up unexpectedly, lights up the room with her celebrity, and challenges April's sense of herself-even her identity, since she insists on calling her by the name she would have had. Mom is slightly eccentric prevaricator who's full of colorful stories, including the revelation that April's father was a deceased actor named Steve McQueen. Yep, the Steve McQueen.

April: "Was it a one-night stand?"
Bernice: "Oh, the memory lasts a lifetime."

But that story turns out to be a slight exaggeration, and the quiet-but-quirky comedy that results is typical of the humor that makes this film enjoyable.

The main narrative arc is based on April's notion that she received less love and had less of a bond with her birth mother than her half-brother (Ben Shenkman), now a doctor. Though the arc may be simple, the characters are not, nor are the situations simplistically polarized into "good mom/bad mom" or "he's the one/he's not the one" dualities. For that, credit both novelist Elinor Lipman and Hunt and her co-screenwriters Alice Arlen and Victor Levin. And credit Midler for pulling off the birth-mother-as-deus-ex-machina role.

As a director, Hunt offers some interesting shots, including a longshot of a figure in an apartment that we come to understand is Frank, talking to her character on the phone. But she doesn't go crazy with shots that call attention to themselves. Everything feels organic, with the pacing underscoring the natural rhythms of life. Though this isn't "real time," it almost feels that way because of the way Hunt approaches her subject matter.