Searching For Fulfillment
Helen Hunt plays a young school teacher named April Epner whose biological clock is ticking. She’s thirty-nine and eager to have a baby, but she and husband Ben, played by Helen’s long time friend Matthew Broderick, are unsuccessful. When Ben suddenly divorces her during the first twenty minutes of the film, and April’s adoptive mother since she was only a week old dies, things seem like they could not get any worse for April.
Fortunately, things turn around and April meets Colin Firth’s character, Frank, a single Englishmen father of two young children, who is also just out of his marriage only a month prior to meeting April. April and Frank quickly become interested in each other when another life changing event occurs for April when her apparent biological mother, Bernice, played by Bette Midler, enters her life. At first April is skeptical that she is her mother, but eventually accepts this although there relationship isn’t without some trials and tribulations.
Ultimately, April discovers that she is indeed pregnant, and by her former husband who still garners some feelings for April despite having left her. She too still feels something for him, but is undeniably interested in Frank, too. That’s about as much as I feel safe to say without spoiling the rather surprising ending.
Then She Found Me is offered as a romantic comedy, but I truly felt like it was more of a romantic drama instead. Sure, there are some funny lines and situations, but I thought there was too much stress and pain in the characters’ lives to really be a comedy. Be that as it may, it didn’t make the film any less entertaining because April’s character is someone you can become interested in quickly, someone you almost cheer for after her sudden divorce and then the death of her adoptive mother. You want to see her happy, and you have a strong feeling it will be so, but how becomes an interesting question when she is split between her former husband who got her pregnant and a new, strong interest in Frank.
On Blu-ray
Then She Found Me arrives on Blu-ray with a DTS-HD Master audio track and about a half hour of special features in SD; a theatrical trailer in HD is also included. As far as the video quality goes, Then She Found Me isn’t bad, but it’s not quite great either. For the most part, the film looks very good to great, but there are several scenes where some compression problems creep up, especially on the skintones of the actors’ faces. Otherwise, the ‘realistic’ setting and objects, etc., look fine on Blu-ray, although I was hoping for just a little more of a ‘wow’ factor from the video; it just didn’t seem as vibrant as I expected, but nonetheless, it was more than sufficient.
The audio track was just fine, the primary driver of this film of course being the dialogue. For the most part the dialogue stays within a certain frequency range, with little shouting or whispering and so forth, but the bottomline is that the audio comes through clearly and distinguishably.
There are not very many special features, but what is included is essentially sufficient; this isn’t the type of film, I suspect, that people would really want to dig into hours and hours of features. Instead, you get:
-Audio Commentary Track with Director Helen Hunt.
-Featurette: This unnamed, twelve minute piece is presented in SD and features lots of behind the scenes footage of Helen in her role as director and actor, as well as plenty of brief cast interviews of Helen, Bette, Colin, and Matthew. Nothing terribly interesting is discussed here, the featurette is mainly about Helen and her drive to make this film.
-Interviews: A total of fifteen minutes of interviews of the four major cast characters, presented in SD. You can choose to play individual interviews or just watch all four back to back. These are more focused and informative than the featurette, as an interviewer sits off camera asking questions about how the film came to be, what made the other actors join Helen, and so forth.
Then She Found Me is an entertaining film, although like many in its genre, it doesn’t offer a great deal of replay value. Other than that, if you are looking for a unique, well put together story of betrayal, romance, and the search for fulfillment – you should check this film out.
