THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985

Hunt plays April Epner, a grade-school teacher who is sandbagged left and right by an avalanche of bad luck. Just as she's decides she wants a baby, her husband, Ben ( Matthew Broderick ) , announces that he's unhappy and is leaving their marriage. Then, April's adopted mother dies. In the midst of dealing with the fallout of the end of her marriage she gets hit on by Frank ( Colin Firth ) , the father of one of her young charges. But April is so upset about Ben walking out she barely takes notice.

Then April is confronted at school by Alan ( out actor John Benjamin Hickey ) , who is the gay assistant for local talk-show hostess Bernice Graves ( Midler ) . Alan informs April that Bernice is her birth mother and would like to get to know her. Without much warning, Bernice, a woman used to having the way smoothed for her, does her best to integrate herself into April's life—only April's not quite sure what that life looks like or feels like anymore. Slowly, she begins to sort out the wheat from the chaff. April begins a tentative relationship with Frank that quickly heads toward the deep end while her life goes up and down with Bernice. But when April discovers she's pregnant, with either Frank or Ben being the father, a whole new set of questions enters the equation.

It takes a while to adjust to the almost somnambulant rhythm of the movie Hunt establishes at the outset, though it picks up along with April's viewpoint. Hunt, whose mouth has pulled down like a basset hound, seems to be sleepwalking through the first half of the film and doesn't do anything to draw the audience toward her. She is so thin and haggard in appearance that it's like a badge of honor. All these things are that much more endearing when April finally begins to reawaken to her new life. When Hunt finally smiles it's as if the sun has broken through the clouds—the risky intention of both the actress and director pays off with patience.

Midler's character is one of those compassionate, insufferable narcissists, always spouting stuff about 'the lessons' to be learned from each and every experience, but she's essentially a control freak and it's really all about her wants and needs. Bernice, who's a sort of mini-version of Oprah, only hears April when April absolutely insists on it. We see that, as Bernice learns to follow April's cues and the relationship grows, Hickey's gay assistant is getting increasingly jealous ( a potential subplot quickly dispensed with to no harm to the story ) . The movie, instead, points Bernice's character in a direction that wasn't expected and Midler gets to bring a great deal of warmth and complexity to a role that could easily have denigrated into a caricature. She dials down her innate wattage just enough to let us see there's a not-quite-secure woman behind the celebrity.

Firth and Broderick do their usual expert work, each playing stock variations on themselves. ( Broderick is the grown-up, irresistible schoolboy and Firth is funny and sexy at once—the personification of the middle-aged dreamboat. ) Cameos by Janeane Garofolo, Tim Robbins and Edie Falco, as Bette's talk show guests, are a nice bonus. The only casting misfire is Salmon Rushdie as Hunt's pediatrician—if only because his appearance in the movie is so unexpected and his identity as a 'serious' author is so fixed in the mind, that to see him in the minor role throws one temporarily out of the picture.

As Then She Found Me moves along, it takes on some of the same sweet, loopy tone of Waitress and the story has a similar arc. It doesn't have the lush, dreamy look of Waitress ( or its sounds ) but it felt just as satisfying and, like that film, I found it just about irresistible. ( But why didn't they write a song for Midler to sing over the end credits? That would have put me over the edge. ) A recent New York Times story reported that the term 'chick flick' has become a pejorative one in the minds of filmmakers; to apply it to a movie that focuses on female characters is a 'no-no,' and that future films in the genre will be described and marketed in ways that will make them more palatable to wider audiences.

Well, I don't care what you call them as long as we get more movies like them—with Waitress and Then She Found Me for starters. Can I get a witness, ladies and my fellow gay chick-flick fanatics?

You can check out my archived reviews at www.windycitytimes.com or www.knightatthemovies.com . Readers can leave feedback at the latter Web site, where there is also ordering information on my book of collected film reviews, Knight at the Movies 2004-2006.