Then She Found Me: Random Thoughts on the Movie Directed by Helen Hunt

It doesn't matter that she's 39 years old. April wants a baby. Her own baby, despite her adoptive mother's pressures for her to follow in the family footsteps. When her husband decides their marriage is over, it looks like April's dreams are toast.

After her adoptive mother's death, April's biological mother makes a grand if slightly bizarre entrance into her life, throwing her already chaotic world even further off-kilter. Only an unexpected friendship-turned-romance seems to restore the balance.

Until April gets another shocker: she's pregnant. But is it a dream come true or a nightmare?

I liked the themes of motherhood and adoption through the movie. There were a couple of places where I almost felt like I'd skipped a critical scene. The movie opens with the wedding ceremony, but doesn't really show the unraveling of April's marriage. One minute they're getting married. Then she's telling her mother she wants a baby. Then her husband is sitting her down to tell her he made a mistake and he's leaving her. April comments later that her husband is immature, etc. It's not hard to believe her, but I think it would have been more powerful to see why their marriage wasn't working and whether she was in denial about it or knew the break was coming.

Another place with the same type of skip-over feel for me was near the end. Through the whole movie, April struggles with being adopted herself and meeting her biological mother and really wrestling with whether the love you have as a mother for an adopted child is really different than love for a biological child.

**SPOILER ALERT**
One minute, April's possibly pregnant with her own child. In the next scene, she is caring for a Chinese toddler, which we assume she has adopted. I would have liked to have seen the struggle and the grief she experienced when the pregnancy proved not to be and when she chose to adopt. This seemed like a critical decision, yet the movie didn't really show that process, and I think lost some emotional power because of it.

That said, other than being a little bit disjointed in places, I thought the movie was well-done. The cast did a great job executing their characters. I enjoyed seeing it.