Then She Lost Me

Then She Found Me, the latest from Helen Hunt, was disappointing. Such a great cast - Colin Firth, Matthew Broderick, Bette Midler, and Helen - what happened? Well, the movie resembles the book not at all. The novel Then She Found Me is low-key with lots of internal dialog. And it's own story is better than what they came up with: desperate 39 year-old wants a baby, but her marriage collapses as her adoptive mother dies and her birth mother contacts her. In the novel, even the threads work better than this screenplay. The adoptive mother in the novel is a Holocaust survivor, which obviously yields much more interesting character development for her and the daughter she adopts. And, with all due respect to Helen, she looks MUCH older than 39 in this movie. How old is she really? It's actually pretty hard to have sympathy for her, when she backslides into her failed marriage with Matthew Broderick while Colin Firth longs for her from the sidelines. Look, Ferris Bueller was cute, but he's no match for devastating Mr. Darcy.


Elinor Lipman wrote this novel, and of all of her books to turn into a film, this was not the best choice. I love her work, but it is usually too subtle for movies. Except for The Ladies' Man - now that has some really funny scenes and excellent one-liners. That novel could work as a movie.
There's so much chick-lit out there: The Spellman Chronicles by Lisa Lutz, Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination by Bridget Jones' author Helen Fielding, or nearly any of the Helen Wells books by Meg Cabot (so funny with a sexy heroine). Helen Fielding's Olivia Joules is hilarious, with a blockbuster climax as the Oscar ceremony receives a bomb threat. You'd think Hollywood would be all over this cameo-rich opportunity. But maybe they're afraid they'll give someone a bad idea. Seems like Helen Hunt got the bad idea with this one.