About Susan Kandell
Location: Dallas
Occupation: filmmaker, film fest admin.
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Last month Helen Hunt graced Dallas, Texas with her presence as her film Then She Found Me kicked off the festivities at the AFI Dallas International Film Festival. Based on a novel by Elinor Lipman, Hunt, in her directorial debut, stars as April Epner, a 39-year-old woman with a loudly ticking biological clock.
The film opens with the marriage of April and Ben (Matthew Broderick). As guests are arriving, her adoptive Jewish mother Trudy is urging the bride to wear a sweater because she is shaking like a bowl of jelly. The moment is both humorous and touching. Only a Jewish mother would insist her daughter cover-up when she’s cold – even if it means masking her beautiful wedding dress. But there’s more significance to this exchange – exactly what makes a mother a mother? April Epner is about to go on a journey of self-discovery to find answers.
Fast forward ten months where we find Trudy (played with all the right inflections by Lynn Cohen) gravely ill in the hospital about to eat Shabbat dinner with her son and daughter. Just as April begins the prayer and candle lighting, Trudy feels compelled to ask about grandchildren. Trudy would like her to consider adoption but April is holding out for a biological child.
April’s response to the conversation is to go shopping, presumably to Victoria’s Secret. But before she can reveal her enticing new undergarments, her immature husband decides that their marriage is a mistake. To compound matters, they have what I can only characterize as the opposite of “make-up sex.” They have “exit sex.” Why waste a perfectly good teddy? Oy! What’s a girl to do?
Well, for one thing, she notices Colin Firth who plays Frank, a recently divorced dad and father of one of her students. She’s also contacted by Bernice, her birth mother, played with the usual flamboyance by Bette Midler. Bernice is a local TV celebrity trying desperately to connect with April. But April just lost one mother and a husband and is not quite ready to let a total stranger; one who tells half-truths, into her life.
The movie hums right along, some parts tender and some parts humorous – especially a visual giggle when Salman Rushdie shows up as April’s gynecologist. There must be a message in there somewhere – I’m just not sure exactly what it is?!
Ms. Hunt is winning (although a little gaunt) in her directorial debut. She manages to sweetly remind us that love comes with a price and is often found where we are not searching for it and that families are created both by blood and by choice.
At the beginning of the film, amidst the strains of lovely Klezmer music, Ms. Hunt relates a Jewish story, “an ordinary Jewish joke” about a father who is teaching his son to have more courage and be less afraid. He puts his son on the second step and says, “Jump and I’ll catch you.” Then on the third step and so on. She continues the story, The boy jumped from a very high step – but this time, the father stepped back and the boy fell flat on his face. He picked himself up, bleeding and crying and his father said to him, “That’ll teach you.”
At the end of the film, she repeats the story and adds a coda. “When he caught him, he was filled with love, and when he didn’t, he was filled with something else, something more – LIFE. Amen!” Who knew you could learn so much from falling off a step?
