anyone else on the fence about "Then She Found Me"?
anyone else on the fence about "Then She Found Me"?
Broadway Legend Joined: 10/13/03
anyone else on the fence about "Then She Found Me"?#1
Posted: 5/4/08 at 8:45pm
MILD SPOILERS. Haven't had this reaction to a film in a long time. Total ambivalence, and unresolved feelings about its overall impact. I literally changed my mind about it after every scene, going back and forth between appreciating its sometimes brutally honest approach to deeply flawed people and then loathing the hand-wringing and sustained navel-gazing. I couldn't make up my mind about almost everything in it, including the two whiny male characters played by Matthew Broderick and Colin Firth, and the casting of Bette Midler as the gentile if athetistic birthmother of a raised-Jewish Helen Hunt. I rooted for Bette, because she's winning in places, particularly in the latter stretches (while trading too much on her own persona in the early scenes). But her very participation in the film as its catalyst is part of a bigger problem. The film veers off in many directions tonally, never quite deciding if it's a true comedy or not. It's not required to provoke laughs of course, but the characters are mostly un-funny, and just when it almost becomes buoyant, it crashes into turgid soap opera.
Still, so many elements are compelling, individual sequences are expertly written and played, and it has startling surprises up its sleeve right down to the final 30 seconds, which wrung tears from me. But it's exasperating, too. I wanted to slap everyone in it at least once.
re: anyone else on the fence about 'Then She Found Me'?#2
Posted: 5/5/08 at 12:04am
Im in the middle of reading the book, actually. Im sure I'll be interested in seeing the movie when Im done.
Although, who knows. I found it so compelling that I stopped in the middle of it to devour Jodi Picoult's latest book -- Change of Heart
If in Heaven you don't excel, you can always party down in hell...
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