movies

**
 
Helen Hunt, making her directing debut, stars as April, an uptight schoolteacher who in just 15 minutes sees it all. Her husband (Matthew Broderick) confesses to cheating and leaves. She finds out she’s pregnant. Her adoptive mother passes away. She meets the man of her dreams (Colin Firth).

And she receives a letter from her birth mother (Bette Midler). Whew. Based on Elinor Lipman’s novel, this is certainly action-packed in the chick-flick sense of things.

The actors seemingly were let loose to do their usual shtick: Firth is Darcy-like, Midler is flamboyant and Hunt’s a lovely party-pooper. While she delivers a painfully heavy-handed moral - loved ones will fail us time and again - at least her film doesn’t further the Hollywood fantasy of perfection.