Actress Helen Hunt makes her directorial debut with this comedy-drama that ponders the meaning of family. She also stars as 39-year-old April, who during the opening credits has just married a fellow teacher (Matthew Broderick) in a small Jewish ceremony. Adopted herself, she still longs to have a kid the old-fashioned way. In short order, however, her husband leaves her, her birth mother contacts her, and the single father (Colin Firth) of one of her young students asks her out. Bette Midler shines as the mother, a walking self-help manual who hosts a local talk show in New York and whose brassy personality contradicts that of her daughter. Firth, keeping the English accent, plays the same sort of silver-tongued suitor, confident yet self-deprecating, as he seems to specialize in, though just when you think he’s too perfect, he does display some mildly rough edges.
Adapting a novel by Elinor Lipman, Hunt wrings humor and and pathos from a story that winds up, mostly, where you think it will, but takes a few interesting detours. It’s stronger in showing the characters’ personalities than in illuminating their interior lives. Just what, for example, is the hold that April’s boyish soon-to-be ex has on her, such that her reaction to his announcement that “I don’t want this life” is to immediately seduce him? Still, Hunt seems to sense the difference between heartwarming and sappy, making her new career path a welcome one.
IMDB link
viewed 4/28/08 (screening at Ritz 5); reviewed 5/2/08
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