STUDIO: ThinkFilm
RELEASE DATE: September 2, 2008
STARRING: Helen Hunt, Bette Midler, Matthew Broderick, and Colin Firth
WRITTEN BY: Alice Arlen and Victor Levin & Helen Hunt
DIRECTED BY: Helen Hunt
FEATURES: Director's Commentary with Helen Hunt
Cast Interviews and Behind the Scenes Footage
Theatrical Trailer

Was Helen Hunt cursed by Woody Allen's The Curse of the Jade Scorpion? Her three films before Curse were major flicks with co-stars like Kevin Spacey, Tom Hanks, and Mel Gibson. Since that 2001 disaster, Hunt has appeared in A Good Woman, Bobby, and Then She Found Me. That's it. The sad thing is that she's still a good actress. I hope she finds a comeback role. I think she's stuck between the age that most casting agents would hire her as a love interest and the one where she could convincingly play a mother. So, what did Helen Hunt do to break out of her career doldrums? What do you do when you can't get the part you're looking to get? Write and direct it for yourself. That's what Helen Hunt did with Then She Found Me, a mixed bag of good performances and manipulative writing that will satisfy Lifetime Movie-of-the-Week viewers looking for similar material with better actors but not those with a low tolerance for sentimentality. The curse continues.

Then She Found Me opens with the break-up of married couple, April (Hunt) and Ben (Matthew Broderick). Just before they split, they have kitchen floor sex one final time and, of course, the woman who has long wanted to get pregnant finally does so at just the wrong moment. Ben leaves and April runs into a sweet single father (Colin Firth). The love triangle - pregnant woman dealing with divorce and going from zero family to a huge one with a new love - could have made for an interesting film, but it's just the beginning of Then She Found Me. While the relationship drama is unfolding in April's life, a family one rears its head. April's adoptive mother dies and a man who represents her birth mother comes to the funeral to tell our heroine that she wants to meet her. It turns out that April's real mother is a famous TV talk show host named Bernice (Bette Midler), who is looking to rekindle her relationship with her daughter after having some regretful women who gave up their kids for adoption on her show. Will April get back together with Ben? Will she find new love? Will she form a relationship with the mother who left her years ago? Why did anyone think that this wasn't too much for one movie?

And that's the real problem with Then She Found Me. Missing moms, single mothers, romantic interludes on linoleum and in the back seat of cars - it all feels like a script that was developed with TV movie intentions. Movies made for cable have a different structure. They need to give the audience a pop or a twist every fifteen minutes or so to keep them tuned in through the commercials. Then She Found Me has that kind of structure, where the coincidences of all these events happening in the same three months of April's life become too much to dramatically bear. And the dull directorial approach of Hunt doesn't help. It not only feels like a TV movie, but one that was much more common in the '80s. Even the Blu-Ray picture on Then She Found Me looks surprisingly dull. Not all Blu-Ray is created equal. Hunt, Firth, Broderick, and Midler are a better than average cast but Then She Found Me is a purely average Blu-Ray release.