then she found me

Loved this film. Helen Hunt directs it and plays a woman called April who is refreshingly real as a woman of 39 who loses a child of a husband (Matthew Broderick), wants a proper child of her own and has her birth mother (Bette Midler) turn up out of the blue.

There's none of that Hollywood face-concrete, long-shots and clever lighting to cover up that fact that Hunt (in her 40's I gather) has lines and isn't 20 anymore. And then there's Colin Firth (divorced husband who fancies her) - who's more dishevelled than D'Arcy-like. Things are unpredictable, messy, and humiliating, children have tantrums and get sore ears, people have 'break-up' sex .... just like real life. The dialogue is great. Oh and watch for a cameo by Salman Rushdie (I kid you not).

In terms of story-telling, I was impressed with the compression at the start of the movie with four scenes: the wedding, the dodgem cars, the mother in hospital and the 'I've made a mistake' scene summing up a stack of stuff about both April's problematic upbringing and her failed marriage.

Some things are glanced at rather than explored in a way that happens with movies that come from books (Elinor Lipman wrote this one), but generally at the end you feel like you've had a complex and satisfying meal rather than the cardboard snacks too often served up at the movies these days.

Here's Wikipedia on the movie and the trailer.