Hope Springs

Hope Springs (2012)
Director: David Frankel
Actors: Tommy Lee Jones, Meryl Streep, Steve Carell

Synopsis: Late middle-aged couple, Kay and Arnold (Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones), embark on a marriage counselling programme, much to the chagrin of Arnold, as a means of sparking some life in their staid and stagnant relationship.

Review: What you see is what you get with this one. It’s a David Frankel film (he of Devil Wears Prada and Sex of the City fame), starring some of the most familiar Hollywood pros – Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones, Steve Carell – in that most crowdpleasing of genres, the marriage dramedy. If you bring that understanding and expectation to the film, then you can’t be too surprised at the sanitised end-result. Jones has fun figuratively, and sometimes, literally, sleepwalking his part of the grumpy, ‘creature of habit’ husband, and Streep coasts playing the dutiful housewife with a whimsical longing for something more. It’s reasonably well played out within those limited confines; in particular, there’s a nice theatricality to the opening domestic scenes where Jones sleeps in a separate room from his wife, and barely looks her in the eye as he goes through his monotonic morning routine. Beyond that, the film’s thesis is a touch lame. Is having Meryl Steep’s character practising her fellatio technique on a banana really all the material they could come up with? And is Jones’ character’s late ‘epiphany’, designed to rush through the prescribed happy ending, a betrayal of his seemingly unalterable stoicism that cloaks the majority of the narrative? (October 2012)