Then She Found Me

Adapting Elinor Lipman’s 1990 novel with Alice Arlen and Victor Levin, Helen Hunt makes her directorial debut. It’s also a mildly embarrassing vanity project in which Hunt, midway into her 40s, tries to pass herself off as a 39-year-old schoolteacher and adult adoptee very worried about her biological clock. This panic of motherhood is exacerbated by the sudden, inconvenient discovery of her own birth mother (Bette Midler), plus a sudden, inconvenient divorce from her schlubby hubby (Matthew Broderick) and a halting romantic interest from the divorced father (Colin Firth) of one of her students. The performances are humane and work well; everyone in the movie registers as a complexly needy human being. But all told, it reads as an unsolicited statement of how, had she been a part of Sex and the City, Hunt might have dignified that well-intended but too-shallow enterprise. Um, OK.