Sounds like a complicated, not-wholly believable situation, but “Then She Found Me” is all about complications:  Complicated people, complicated relationships, and complicated lies.  The film uses our aversion to coincidences to its advantage by giving us a heroine equally incredulous at her own overwrought situation.  Helen Hunt, in her first directorial feature, plays April with a dazed weariness that keeps the story firmly grounded in reality.  Who hasn't experienced a week or month or year so bizarre, so unbelievable as to flirt with the idea that life is some kind of movie under the cruel direction of a prankster?

Approximately half of the circumstances that befall her are the fruits of her own desperate decision-making, thus the film speaks honestly to the notion that if life seems to be treating you unfairly, you must be doing something wrong.  One such mistake is sleeping with her husband just minutes after he announces, “I can't live like this anymore.”  She discovers that she is pregnant with his child just as she is hitting it off with Frank (Firth), the single parent of one of her students.  With the hands of her biological clock ticking away and her desire to have a child of her own very much alive, she decides to try to make it work.  She and Frank find solace in the crumbiness of the other's situation, and soon enough they begin to suspect that they are soul mates.  Maybe she can have the best of both worlds after all . . . .

The suspicion that the pairing is too good to be true is, in Frank's case, correct.  April is not quite over her husband, and to make matters even more complicated, she has to deal with another distraction:  Bernice Graves (Midler), the needy New York television talk show host claiming to be her real mother.

All these relationships are broken and then put back together in occasionally surprising ways.  What's more surprising is how unselfconscious Hunt's picture is.  It's a small character study that wrestles with big questions about identity, displacement, and the constitution of family without stretching itself too thin.  Most admirably, it manages to be blunt but respectful of the dimensions of selfishness.  At one point, April tells Frank, “I will hurt you.  I will.  I won't always mean to, but sometimes I will.”  Pain-tolerance as love might not be a particularly romantic ideal, but it's as good a theory as any out there.