OF ALL THE many Oscar-winning actors, few have had a film career as undistinguished as that of Helen Hunt, the undeserved winner of the Best Actress award for the wildly overrated As Good as it Gets(1997).
Hunt came to fame in the TV sitcom Mad About You, a hit prime time show for most of the 1990s, and she first dabbled in directing on four of the later episodes.
Making an inauspicious feature film debut as writer-director with Then She Found Me, Hunt delivers dollops of gooey blandness. She takes the leading role as April, a 39-year-old New York schoolteacher who, in the whirlwind early scenes, marries a colleague (Matthew Broderick). They break up within a year and April's adoptive mother dies.
Enter her birth mother, a daytime TV chat show host played in characteristically irrepressible mode by Bette Midler. She claims that April's father was a movie star (Steve McQueen, no less), although this is contradicted after a Google search by April's new suitor, an English single parent played by an uncomfortably miscast Colin Firth in a role that cries out for Hugh Grant. In a casting gimmick, Salman Rushdie pops up as an obstetrician.
Slight and simple as it was, Mad About You, which is repeated on RTÉ at present, peppered more wit and insight into a half-hour episode than Hunt achieves at more than three times that length in this glibly scripted, manipulatively directed melodrama. It is clearly aimed at the so-called chick flick audience, but some of the chicks sitting near me at this flick were too busy texting to care.
