Then She Found Me (3 1/2 stars)
Directed by Helen Hunt. Written by Alice Arlen, Victor Levin, and Helen Hunt, based on the novel by Elinor Lipman. With Helen Hunt, Colin Firth, Bette Midler, and Matthew Broderick. (R)
It's been a long road to the silver screen for Then She Found Me, the directorial debut from Helen Hunt. Based on the novel of the same name by Easthampton author Elinor Lipman, it was first optioned almost 20 years ago, and Hunt spent the last decade fighting to get it made. After hearing "every version of no I've ever imagined," she finally succeeded, though it meant reshaping the original story in ways that raised concern with fans of Lipman's novel.
The film doesn't suffer, but in an interesting twist peculiar to our digital age, Lipman has taken to the Internet to defend the adaptation. Writing on her author's blog at Amazon.com, she notes—in an open letter addressed "Dear Worrywarts"—"The book is the book and the movie is its own entity… I appreciate your loyalty to my characters, but now I hope you will put my sentences aside to see how a true book lover brought my characters back to life." It's a remarkably magnanimous view for an author to take, and filmgoers can now benefit from her egalitarian take on adaptation.
In the film, Hunt is April Epner, grade school teacher, adopted daughter, and wife to man-child Ben (Matthew Broderick), the kind of selfish and wishy-washy husband who's paralyzed until his wife tells him what to do and how to react, and then resents her for being the stronger of the pair. April is desperate for a child of her own, but her advancing age (Hunt, almost 45 now, plays April as a worn-out, enervated 39) is making it difficult. When Ben walks out on their marriage early in the film, it seems all but impossible.
That breakup scene is one of the best in the film, and, at first, one of the strangest; it's only afterward that we realize that the reason it seems strange is that it's so true to life. Instead of the standard slamming doors and screeching tires, the scene is full of the mess of mixed emotions that are the stuff of marriage.
When Ben retreats to his mother's house, April finds herself drifting into the orbit of Frank (Colin Firth), a single father and writer who works in his parked Jeep while April teaches his young son. In quick succession, the film drops a couple of bombs: April's adoptive mother dies, and a stranger seen lurking around the funeral party brings news that her birth mother wants to contact her. Here the film reverts to the sitcom style Hunt perfected during her long run on television, becoming a strung-together collection of quick scenes made up of a kind of snappy patter that feels out of place in a feature film. It's short-lived, but the quick setup to what prove to be the film's main relationships makes it harder to believe some of what comes later—especially when April gets the unexpected news that she's pregnant. Though Bette Midler is certainly well cast as the windy and self-absorbed talk show host who gave up her daughter, the mix of comedy and drama is shakiest when she is onscreen.
The heart of the film, though, remains April's ever-shifting idea of family, and that is where its strengths lie. The film makes clear in its final scenes that whether a child is adopted, brought into a family by marriage, or reared by a single parent, what truly matters is how well-loved it is once it's home; the paths there are many.
Priceless (3 stars)
Directed by Pierre Salvadori. Written by Beno?t Graffin and Pierre Salvadori. With Audrey Tatou, Gad Elmaleh, Marie-Christine Adam, and Vernon Dobtcheff. (PG-13)
Priceless has been described as an updated take on Breakfast at Tiffany's, but while there are certain surface similarities, this fizzy French import has a decidedly Continental slant in its approach to sexual mores. It's easy to imagine the story—essentially a romance between a gold-digging party girl and a naive gigolo—being picked up and repatriated by a Hollywood outfit looking for a ready-made sex comedy; easier still is imagining how quickly they would ruin it by trying to make its main characters as harmless as possible.
Audrey Tatou (Amelie) stars as Ir?ne, a venal young woman on the make in the south of France. Not quite a prostitute, she's more a perpetual mistress, taking up with a round-robin of the wealthy, aging men who haunt the Mediterranean shores. (She keeps their details neatly organized in her little black book, inking in a cross as they go to the great resort in the sky.) Hoping to hit the jackpot of marriage and an early widowhood, she's content to pass the time amassing the closets full of swag her suitors lay at her feet.
When she mistakes hotel bartender Jean (Gad Elmaleh) for a young playboy—Ir?ne only puts up at the sort of hotel where even the bartenders wear tuxedos—her come-hither stares turn him into a man on a mission, but after their single night together she disappears. When she returns a year later, Jean picks up where he left off, only to have his Cary Grant routine undone by an unexpected booking in his borrowed suite.
Elmaleh, whose enormous and doleful eyes so resemble the great Buster Keaton's, shares with that actor a wonderful sense of comedy built on the unwavering earnestness and—even when they're scheming—innocence of his characters. When his Jean depletes his modest nest egg in a hopeless attempt to woo Ir?ne, he makes us feel for him; when, soon after, a well-to-do older woman—a cougar, in the parlance of our times—takes him in as a kept man, we cheer him on as he does whatever is necessary to win Ir?ne. Refreshingly, the film doesn't go out of its way to make these relationships more innocent than they are; everyone involved knows what they're doing, and not once does it pass judgment. On the other hand, it doesn't make a point of showing us much of what goes on behind closed doors; the few bedroom scenes belong to Elmaleh and Tatou.
Tatou is winning as well; like Hepburn before her, she has an undercurrent of sunniness no matter what the situation. She can also move from ing?nue to vamp in an instant, and watching her slink through the gilded hotels of the C?te d'Azur, it's easy to understand Jean's instant attraction. That combination of qualities is a big advantage when the tables are turned and Ir?ne is the one who finds herself penniless; with most actresses we wouldn't feel much sympathy, but Tatou makes it work. Even if her character's last act change of heart is both unlikely and expected, Priceless is successful largely because of her work, and her chemistry with Elmaleh.
Playtime (5 stars)
Directed by Jacques Tati. Written by Jacques Tati and Jacques Lagrange, with English dialogue by Art Buchwald. With Jacques Tati, Barbara Dennek, and Rita Maiden. (NR)
It's a crime Jacques Tati isn't better known on these shores. The French actor, who made a career playing his umbrella-carrying alter-ego Monsieur Hulot, was also a talented writer and director whose films gently poked and prodded the gleaming metallic promise of modernity to see if there was still life under all the plate glass and chrome. His 1958 film Mon Oncle won an Academy Award, but, perhaps because he didn't come from the broad slapstick tradition of vaudeville—his first big film didn't appear until the '40s—he's never achieved the name recognition here of a Keaton or Chaplin. Now his 1967 masterpiece Playtime has been re-released, and American film lovers have the chance to discover him all over again.
Conceived in the wake of his Oscar success, the film proved to be both an artistic high point and a personal disaster. Ruinously expensive, the filming stretched out to nearly a decade and bankrupted Tati. To match his grand vision of a modernistic Paris, the filmmaker built a gargantuan set dubbed "Tativille"—so large it required its own power plant—then had to rebuild much of it when high winds tore it apart. To capture the scope of his creation, he filmed in gorgeous-but-pricey 70mm, another expense he could ill afford. Within a year of the film's release, Tati had lost everything.
And yet Playtime is joyous. Though the cast numbers into the hundreds, the film is less about human interaction than our relationship with the exquisite cages we've built for ourselves. Tativille is a world ruled by space-age design, where simple function is gleefully sacrificed for the alluring beauty of a sleek contour, and Tati has only to drop Hulot into this modern maze to point up its absurdity. At the same time, Tati seems to celebrate the quixotic curiosity that leads us to build such elaborate baubles.
The result is at once hilarious and ridiculously familiar, and anyone who has ever felt overwhelmed at navigating the dizzying labyrinth of an airport or office tower will find a kindred spirit in Hulot. The way the film is shot—all medium and long shots, no close-ups—strengthens the feeling that we could be any one of a thousand faces in the teeming crowd. Even Hulot, who appears in so much of the film, is hardly more than a passing presence in this world (likely a reason for the film's initial flop with a public expecting a standard Tati comedy).
Some of this material has been covered before, notably in Keaton's 1922 two-reeler The Electric House, but never with the depth of artistry on display here. When at long last the carefully cultivated facade of control falls away, the feeling is one of riotous liberation, and an affirmation of the cluttered, messy emotions that make us so gloriously human."
