Then She Found Me
Directed by Helen Hunt
There is a fault line running through America, a chasm so vast that it cannot be bridged. It is not the divide between the Hillary voter and the Obama voter, or between the red state and the blue state. These are rifts that can be healed. The same may not be said for the gap between the average male moviegoer and the phenomenon known as the “chick flick.”
The problem, quite simply, is goo. The average male moviegoer likes literal, actual goo–stuff that oozes, especially Karo syrup dyed red to look like blood. The depiction of such goo provokes a visceral thrill. He cannot, however, abide emotional goo, by which I mean scenes intended to provoke a sentimental response, especially if those scenes involve children, relationships, or disease.
The depiction of that kind of goo leaves our male moviegoer in a state of frantic unease, comparable to the most dreadful moment he can imagine: that moment when the woman in his life says, “I think we need to talk about our relationship.” He would rather go to the dentist than live through any sort of evocation of that confrontation with direct and unambiguous feeling.
It may be true that women are now better educated than men, that women in the middle and upper-middle classes may either be at parity in salary, or edging ahead. But there is one thing women cannot do, and that is to get their significant male others to attend a movie laden with emotional goo. And so it is the women who compromise, and Hollywood knows it: You can get females to go to movies men want to see, but you cannot get men to go to movies women want to see.
This is why there are so few chick flicks. Which is really too bad, because it is only in the chick flick these days that a moviegoer can be rewarded with a story that takes place in some reasonable facsimile of the real world, involving characters who bear some resemblance to actual human beings.
There used to be all kinds of movies made for a predominantly male audience in which story and character were paramount: workplace dramas, westerns, war movies, detective stories, gangster tales. Those movies are now extremely rare. They have been supplanted by science fiction, horror, comic-book, and wildly comic films whose primary characteristic is precisely that they do not take place in a recognizable reality.
The most remarkable American film to be released in 2008, so far, is a chick flick that is so chick-flicky -Hollywood wouldn’t even touch it. Helen Hunt, onetime star of the sitcom Mad About You and a most unlikely Best Actress Oscar winner 10 years ago for As Good As It Gets, has coauthored, directed, and is the star of Then She Found Me. In times past, this tale of a woman put up for adoption as a baby, whose birth mother tracks her down just as her marriage collapses and her adoptive mother suddenly dies, would have been a major studio release. Hunt spent more than a decade trying to get it made, and finally found a small production shop to give her a few million dollars and just 27 days to film it.
The lack of big-studio gloss turns out to have been a creative blessing. Then She Found Me is a passionate, urgent, funny, sad, and sobering piece of work, with an unromanticized Brooklyn setting. The characters have as many layers as an onion, and Then She Found Me peels them. The protagonist is as flawed and capable of bad behavior as the man who walks out on her, the woman who abandoned her as a baby, the cruel woman who raised her, and the wounded divorced man she begins going out with. They all make mistakes, they all hurt each other; but in the end, they are ordinary, reasonably decent people trying to get through the day.
There are flaws in Then She Found Me. Hunt has chosen to emphasize the Jewish observance of her characters, so it is disheartening to see her get various details wrong about that observance. She even has her character go out on a date during the seven-day period of mourning following the death of a family member, which would be inconceivable. That aside, Then She Found Me is a small miracle. The undeniable fact that no man, aside from a deeply evolved person such as myself, will allow himself to be taken to see it is his loss.
John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
