Helen Hunt did it all in this chick-flick. She co-produced, co-wrote
(adapting a novel), directed, and starred in this film about a woman facing a
series of mid-life crises.
April Epner is a 39-year-old teacher in a New York elementary school,
disappointed that she has never become pregnant, but still hopeful. Her hopes
are dashed somewhat by the fact that her juvenile husband has decided to leave
her in order to go back to his mother's house. Within a couple of days her own
adoptive mother dies.
If that sounds like the setting for a tragedy, it is not. It is the death
necessary for a rebirth. The film is actually a dramedy. The death of her
mother is soon followed by the appearance of her eccentric birth mother, about whom she
had previously known nothing. In the next stage of renascence, her bumbling husband is soon replaced
in her bed by a handsome,
sensitive Englishman who is the father of one of her students.
That sounds good on the surface, but life is complicated, and this is a film about life.
April betrays her new love by having break-up sex with her husband, and this
results in something they could never achieve before - a pregnancy. When they
go to the first ultrasound, they are so moved by the experience that they promptly have sex
again. The Englishman is in the process of recovering from having been
abandoned with two children by his own wife, and does not react well to
April's assorted betrayals. He gets through the first incident and accepts the
resulting pregnancy, but the second one understandably drives him off. April's birth mother,
meanwhile, is a blustering talk show host who charges into April's life like a
rhinoceros, and fails to provide candid answers to her daughter's questions
about the circumstances of her conception and birth. The conclusion of the
film is about April's mother begging April for forgiveness for her mistakes
past and present, while April in turn is begging for forgiveness from her new
boyfriend.
There's a lot of excellent material in this film and some very good moments
closely observed. Despite the seemingly unrealistic chain of dramatic
developments in April's life (I've omitted many of the details, which start to
pile up like a yearly synopsis of Days of Our Lives), the film succeeds in
developing three characters who are completely distinct, interesting, and believable: April
(Helen Hunt), the Englishman (Colin Firth), and the birth mother (Bette
Midler). They rarely resorted
to clichés, each of them being intelligent, thoughtful, and complicated
enough to express thoughts in a witty and/or interesting way. Each of them
speaks as if written by a separate author. That's a good thing. It means that
they are all
real characters, not extensions of the author, and the script could turn any
one of them into the central character with only slight twists of perspective.
That alone should earn our respect. I often write that it would be nice to
see movies about realistic, complicated people in genuine situations, but such
movies rarely appear. Hollywood's concept of "realistic" is to create a
maverick cop from another planet who doesn't have any super powers. The
Hollywood concept of "'complicated" is that the vampire feels really bad when
he kills people, so he tries only to kill bad men. In the typical
Sundance-type independent movie, realism is another word for "junkie." It
is only in the
more experimental mumblecore indie movies where there really are ordinary people
doing ordinary things. Unfortunately, it is not possible for audiences to stay
awake while those things are being done. Given all that, I am always ready to
applaud when a film can hold my attention with three ordinary people facing real life
with no
super powers nor drug addiction nor weapons. Bravo to Helen Hunt for accomplishing
that.
The film is not without its flaws. The character of April's husband
(Matthew Broderick) is badly underwritten. We hear that he is childish, but we
don't get any understanding of why, and we might not even know the problem
existed if the script didn't keep reminding us verbally. We hear that he has
uncanny power over April, and we can see that he exerts uncommon sexual
magnetism whenever he is near her, but we don't "get" that either. Matthew
Broderick is always sympathetic on camera, but his alleged sexual power is
absolutely mystifying. The character seems soft in the head, and carries
himself like the kind of
guy who would date a woman for months before finding the courage to hold her
hand. Furthermore, I still have absolutely no idea why he wanted to leave April
to go back to his mother in the first place. His motivation was entirely unconvincing and, for
that matter, entirely unknown.
The film's other main liability is a tendency to "pile on" - primarily with
one dramatic development after another, but also with a series of
emotion-milking, heart-tugging moments which aren't even related to the
central storylines.
Those problems tend to drag the film down a bit, but I enjoyed the three
central characters, and that made the film a winner in my book. Like Hunt
herself, the film is practical and down to earth. There are no fancy visual
stylings in the direction, and the script is a straightforward chronological
narrative. This film will produce neither prestigious awards nor big box office results, but it will demonstrate
to the industry that Hunt has the
ability to connect with audiences from behind the camera as well as facing it.
