The Return of Helen Hunt

The actress-director never quite disappeared, but for an Academy Award winner, she sure took it easy for a while.

Hers was not the post-Best Actress pathway of comic book movies or prestige bids; she followed up her Oscar performance in As Good As It Gets with, um, Pay It Forward? But more than a decade later, Helen Hunt has somehow managed to top herself.

In Then She Found Me, which Hunt produced, co-wrote, and directed, she stars as middle-aged schoolteacher April Epner, just married to man-child Ben (Matthew Broderick) and desperately seeking spawn. When Ben quickly deems the hasty nuptials to be a “mistake,” April returns to the drawing board. When her adopted mother suddenly dies, only to be replaced by a feisty talk-show host claiming to be bio-mom (a glammy Bette Midler), April’s life is suddenly in upheaval.

Enter schlubby-yet-somehow-dashing Frank, a single dad (played by Colin Firth) who happens to possess the required British accent for hastily sweeping April off her feet. What transpires is an astonishingly assured debut for Hunt, whose previous directing experience consists of four “Mad About You” episodes. The film is funny, but not in a Harold & Kumar way, and weaves mature stories into a fabric of universal truths. From the top-down stellar cast, Hunt the actress proves to be Hunt the director’s greatest asset, in a performance that possibly tops The Performance.

But Hunt the director only emerged once a worthy story fell into her hands. “I always knew that if I fell in love with a story so much and that I had to be the one to tell it, then I would direct it,” says Hunt. Then She Found Me was a novel written in 1990 by Elinor Lipman, and when Hunt’s producing partner read it (in one night), she thought it a perfect vehicle for her friend. After years of “twists and turns”—and wriggling the rights from the clutches of a stubborn Sigourney Weaver—Hunt finally found herself in front of a blank page, with a movie to write. In the end, she admits to “ravaging” the original novel (Lipman is very supportive of the film), her sole goal to make a funny movie about a painful subject—betrayal.

Apparently she succeeded, attracting her famous costars on the script’s strength alone. “The best movies I know, and the best directors I know, talk about the movie underneath the movie, the secret movie that you are telling.” And when Hunt discovered this secret, she let everyone in on it. “You can only love when you’ve made peace with betrayal” was her mantra in creating this film and its characters, and she made sure everyone—from the cast, to the art department—knew it. But can Helen Hunt the director ever go back to just being Helen Hunt the actress? “If someone wonderful wanted to come along and invite me to sit in my trailer and play with my daughter for an hour, and then step out and act for half an hour, and be brought a sandwich—I mean, I can barely remember what that’s like.”