Dr. Masani (Salman Rushdie, left) speaks to April Epner (Helen Hunt) as Frank (Colin Firth, second from right) and Ben (Matthew Broderick) listen on in Then She Found Me.

THINKfilm

Helen Hunt has won a best actress Academy Award for As Good As It Gets and four best actress Emmy Awards for Mad About You, as well as being a lauded stage actress. Now she makes her feature film directing debut in the romantic tragic-comedy Then She Found Me, not only working behind the camera with the likes of showbiz powerhouse Bette Midler, but on screen herself as the film’s central character. Talk about chutzpah!

Directing for the first time while at the same time directing oneself is no easy feat. But Hunt shows a flair for the offbeat moments of Then She Found Me’s quirky tale of April Epner, a woman who is trying to find herself in the midst of personal chaos.

Then She Found Me is based on the book by Elinor Lipman and Hunt herself is one of three credited writers (apparently at one time working with Victor Levin and then solo). So it’s really her baby with a capital B — and coincidentally much of the film revolves around 39-year-old April’s attempts to become pregnant.

The results? Hunt gets high marks for directing, creating some dramatic moments as schoolteacher April’s life grows increasingly complex. The acting is first rate, although Midler may have taken one too many bubbly pills in her early scenes.

But the story is a sudsy melodrama that would seem more at home on the little screen, say on the female-oriented Lifetime cable channel, than it does in the glare of reality on the big. The problems thrust at April and her seeming inability to decide on which path to take are monumental.

Why is April so all at sea? Consider that not long into Then She Found Me April is dumped by her child-man husband (played puppyishly by Matthew Broderick) a few months after the wedding. She goes into a numbing funk and can’t imagine things getting any worse. Then her adoptive mother dies. Then April discovers, out of the blue, that her birth mother (Midler) is waiting in the wings eager to reclaim her. Then she begins a tentative romance with the father (Colin Firth) of one of her students. Then she discovers she’s pregnant. Then she’s befuddled by the recurring appearances of her estranged husband and is unable to make up her mind about which way her heart is leading her.

No wonder April seems so unhappy. No wonder Firth’s Frank Harte is so frustrated and angry.

Midler’s Bernice Graves is so effusive at first — and a bubbly local daytime TV talk show host to boot — that she seems a character from some other movie. It doesn’t help that the stories Bernice weaves about the amazing circumstances surrounding April’s birth and subsequent adoption, some sounding as though they’d been cobbled from a 19th-century stage production of Oliver Twist, begin disintegrating as April tries to dig for the truth.

Yet there are several scenes that are handled artfully by Hunt. The moment when April’s husband tells her “I made a mistake” is played for all its awkward awfulness and sadness, as Broderick’s Ben pleadingly tells a stunned April, “I don’t want this life.”

A scene in which April tries to snag a hair from Bernice’s comb so she can have a DNA test done to establish if Bernice really is her mother is prickly and funny. Even better are the amusingly warmhearted scenes in which April shows up for her ultrasound pregnancy scan with two men, with Salman Rushdie playing the befuddled doctor.

There also are well-handled dramatic scenes between April and Bernice about their relationship and between April and Frank about theirs. These are done frankly and get to the point.

Through it all, April muddles on as disaster follows disaster. It’s not always pretty. It’s like real life . . . only more so.

***Then She Found Me

Starring: Helen Hunt, Bette Midler, Colin Firth, Matthew Broderick.

Rated: R, contains sexual situations, adult themes, profanity.

mjanuson@projo.com