Mr. Darcy, you make good movies

Tag: airbrushing tool

Whereas John Cusack has managed to star in a series of romantic comedies that get worse and worse and -- just when it seems it can't possibly get worse than Must Love Dogs -- even worse still, his British counterpart Colin Firth has somehow continued on in this genre unscathed.

In his latest venture, Then She Found Me, Firth plays opposite Helen Hunt as a divorce tentatively looking for love again. It's a role that calls for a heavy dose of sweetness, much like his Bridget Jones character, but by invoking a sort of restrained hostility, he creates just the right amount of bitterness to balance this out.

It's incredibly difficult, even with a smart script, to play the romantic lead and not succumb to any one-dimensional tropes at least some of the time (think: rambling confessions of love with a touch of self-deprecating humour; arguments that boil down to fear of commitment and culminate in passionate smooching; chase scenes through the departures hall at the airport, etc.). But Firth -- bless his caustic, British soul -- is steadfast in his dismissal of all things even remotely trite.

Take, for example, his character's response to a dinner invitation: "Thank you, you're gorgeous ... I'm leaving now ... Yes, I'd love to get some dinner."

Perfectly awkward, awkwardly perfect, and endearing without any secondary embarrassment.

Of course, part of the reason he's able to pull this off has to do with his Oscar-winning costar, Hunt, who also makes her directorial debut here, too.

She immediately gets points for leaving the airbrushing tool and all digital trickery behind, instead embracing her natural looks (and truly, laugh lines have never looked more beautiful).

As April Epner, a 39-year-old kindergarten teacher who's been ditched by her puerile fiance, then left to cope with her adoptive mother's death, she is a strong-willed but somewhat weak-hearted woman.

Audiences will quickly feel sympathetic toward April, especially as her biological clock is practically banging out the seconds over her head. But this isn't another a story about a lonely single woman's plight.

Soon after her adoptive mother passes away, she gets a note from a woman named Bernice (Bette Midler), claiming to be her birth mother. And that's not all she claims: April's real father, she says, was Steve McQueen.

When April tells Frank (Firth) about this soon after their first date, his response is classic: "Well, I mean, you don't not look like Steve McQueen."

And he's sort of right, at least if you squint hard enough.

But far more important than April's vague resemblance tothe late star of The Great Escape is the way in which she begins to form an entirely new family, comprised of those she's genetically linked to but also those with whom she's developed an emotional connection.

Her ultimate decision about whether she'll continue trying to conceive a child on her own or adopt one is a choice she makes only after she's dealt with all the grown-up drama in her life, and it's something that's at once unpredictable and yet not at all surprising (then again, when your obstetrician is Salman Rushdie, most logic tends to go out the window).

The most refreshing aspect of Then She Found Me, though, is the fact that nothing is ever wrapped up neatly; the message at the end isn't the usual pap about how life revolves around love and simple pleasures -- it acknowledges that there's a lot of pain in even the best relationships and that fate inevitably throws a complicated twist into even the simplest of situations. The key is learning how to flow with the twist.