Film

There are incompetent movies, and then there are incompetent movies in which Salman Rushdie turns up playing a gynecologist. (Was it too late to cast Padma as a nurse?) Adapted from a novel by Elinor Lipman, Hunt’s feature directorial debut chronicles the midlife crisis of a childless schoolteacher, April (Hunt), whose strenuously shlumpy husband (Broderick) abruptly walks out on her, prompting her student’s widower father (Firth) to swoop in in awkward fashion. Everyone behaves impulsively in this movie, though some of that may be due to erratic acting: Firth has several scenes that require him to start shouting for no apparent reason and then walk out as a cooling-off measure. There’s no problem here that couldn’t be solved with high doses of Ritalin.

In crisis No. 7B, the adopted April is contacted by a prevaricating TV personality (Midler) who claims to be her birth mother. Did she abandon the baby because her parents forced her to, because she was irresponsible or because the father was Steve McQueen? Dramaturgical curveballs fly at regular intervals: It’s the kind of movie where April will say, “Things can’t possibly get worse than this.” And then…cut to a funeral. The predictably narcissistic moral (spoiler): Don’t be a racist; adopting an Asian kid isn’t so bad.