Monday, September 3, 2012

Hope Springs


LEAD CAST:  Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones, Steve Carell, Elizabeth Shue DIRECTOR:  David Frankel  SCREENWRITER:  Vanessa Taylor   PRODUCER:  Todd Black, Guymon Casady  EDITOR:  Steven Weisberg  MUSICAL DIRECTOR: Theodoro Shapiro  GENRE: Drama RUNNING TIME: 100 minutes  CINEMATOGRAPHER:  Florian Ballhaus  LOCATION:  USA  DISTRIBUTOR:  Columbia Pictures


Technical Assessment:  4
Moral Assessment:  4
CINEMA rating:  V18 

Every morning, Kay (Meryl Streep) makes breakfast for her husband Arnold (Tommy Lee Jones)—a strip of bacon, an egg, coffee.  Every morning, Arnold eats his breakfast with his face buried in  a newspaper.  Then he goes off to work.  Every night after a quiet dinner, Kay washes the dishes while Arnold falls asleep watching TV golf.  She wakes him up, they go to bed—in separate bedrooms.  Once she primps up and visits him in his bedroom in a clumsy attempt at marital closeness, but he deflects her touches, saying he doesn’t feel well.  Kay knows that something is missing, sorely missing, in their 31-year-old marriage.  Not just the children, laughter, or fights, but something that used to hold their marriage together: intimacy.
Tired of getting impersonal anniversary gifts from Arnold—like a heater, a cable TV subscription, and other unromantic items for the house—Kay signs up for an Intensive Couples Counseling week with celebrity marriage counselor Dr. Bernie Feld (Steve Carell) in Great Hope Springs, Maine.  She pays $4,000 out of her own savings and buys round trip plane tickets for two.  Scoffing at the idea as a waste of money, the penny-pinching Arnold quips “Cancel it!” but Kay, resolute and hoping against hope—is going, with or without Arnold.
Hope Springs is NOT a comedy.  It is basically a two-actor drama, and a compelling one though with a hint of the comic—no mean thanks to the directorial skills of David Frankel, the same guy who helmed The Devil Wears Prada.  The perfect pairing of Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones provides the spine of the movie.   Streep is, of course, an actress nonpareil, and here, again, she virtually becomes the character she reprises.  Lee Jones on the other hand outperforms himself as he gives life to a character so untypical of his other roles.
The theme of Hope Springs, which Vanessa Taylor’s script masterfully developed without reducing the film into soft porn, is marital intimacy, or the near death of it, and how it is revived through therapy evoking long gone memories of satisfying union.  The heart of the story is the counseling done behind closed doors with the therapist delving into the sexual history of the dying marriage.  Carell rightfully projects a no-nonsense, no holds barred therapist here, stimulating and facilitating interaction between the estranged couple.  What is spoken and spoken about in the therapist’s clinic, and what is done by the couple inside the bedroom upon his instructions, are serious stuff that serves more to instruct than to entertain.  While Hope Springs attempts to include light moments (sometimes bordering on the naughty) in order to appeal to a wider audience, and MTRCB rates it R-13, CINEMA staunchly puts its foot down and gives it a Strictly for Adults rating, for its theme and graphic sexual content.
Couples married “too long” may relate to Kay and Arnold’s situation, and vicariously learn from the counseling they go through, thus CINEMA suggests you catch the movie, which is a statement upholding marriage.  Its message is loud and unequivocal as delivered in Dr. Feld’s website where he tells people who want to save their marriage, “It's not too late for anyone who truly wants it and is willing to try.”  The very title Hope Springs is more than the name of a town in Maine, USA; it is also an echo of the saying “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.”