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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mel O&#039;Drama" data-source="post: 443159" data-attributes="member: 23">Then She Found Me (2007) <img src="https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.pinimg.com%2F736x%2F15%2F4b%2Fa1%2F154ba17c0b7b74e2f48809636722e967.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=5a9506e04bb95e610de724087bb9efa0cf7384ce107acfadc27cc334b27af9b5" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 582px" />It's taken me quite some time to get round to watching this one. The British poster image of Helen Hunt and Colin Firth facing one another in profile and touching foreheads is somehow embedded in my memory (presumably from seeing it on the side of buses back in the day), and it just says "generic romcom".  I prefer the poster above, which I don't recognise. At least it alludes to the meaning behind the title, whereas the other poster suggests a couple who were lucky to find one another (still true of the plot, but also the more generic part).After the film, I read that Matthew Broderick, Bette Midler and Colin Firth had all worked for minimum pay to help Helen Hunt complete this passion project, which raised the film in my esteem. Even before that I'd thought it was charming and quite touching.All performances are great, but it possibly goes without saying that Helen Hunt is the best thing in this. She's got such class and has that rare gift of getting the viewer to feel what her character is feeling (which I suppose is ultimately the aim of any acting performance, even though it happens so rarely). It's probably a little sledgehammer to measure how good she is by how well she cries, but my god - the way those real tears flow when she lets loose. I think she only has one big crying scene here, but she always looks as though she's about to cry anyway, with those furrowed eyelids concealing so much pain (even though she's in the enviable position of choosing between Matthew Broderick and Colin Firth). Helen performs double duty here, since the film is her directorial debut, and it looks perfectly fine to my eyes. Colin Firth plays the stressed-out abandoned single parent role that usually wins awards for actresses. His intensity at times is almost frightening. And Matthew Broderick does the adorable-but-frustrating man-child thing so well.How intriguing to realise on watching the end titles that Salman Rushdie had played the doctor. They also mentioned that Tim Robbins had played himself (presumably one of the guests on Midler's character's talk show) which means I've unintentionally watched him in two films on two consecutive evenings.The plot is very soapy indeed, with each twist soapier than the last. It's carried by the conviction of the performances and dialogue, though, and these are so well executed that there were two or three which took me by surprise even though I should have seen them coming from a mile away. One of them (the last scene to take place in a hospital setting) even had me reflecting on how impressive it was that I'd been enjoying the dynamics so much that I hadn't even considered the outcome, obvious as it was to anyone familiar with the conventions of soapy drama.</blockquote>

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