Movie Review: "Hope Springs"

"Hope Springs": C+.  I hate to say it, but the best part of "Hope Springs" was a short dialogue between Kay (Meryl Streep) and Karen (Elisabeth Shue), a bartender in a small Maine tavern, as Kay bellies up to the bar.

Kay: Do you have wine?
Karen: Yes. Do you like white or red?
Kay: Red.
Karen: Then I'd go with the white.

Kay and Arnold (Tommy Lee Jones) are empty nesters living in a comfortably modest house in Omaha. They've been married thirty-one years, but their relationship resembles that of housemates rather than spouses. As omniscient observers we quickly realize that the problem lies entirely with Arnold. It isn't just his lack of warmth. It's his cluelessness at the unsubtle hints that Kay throws his way when she wants to rekindle the spark. From the time he sits down to breakfast until the end of the day when he falls asleep in his chair while watching golf lessons on TV, he barely acknowledges Kay's existence. Kay cries herself to sleep.

According to Eileen (Jean Smart, ooo-la-lah!), Kay's fellow clerk in the Coldwater Creek store, there's no sense trying to get her husband to change. "A marriage is what it is," advises Eileen. Unconvinced, Kay soon learns of a week-long marriage counseling class offered by author/practitioner Dr. Feld in a quaint Maine tourist town. The cost is a hefty $4000, but Kay signs up herself and Arnold, and buys the plane tickets. Of course Arnold puts up a fight, insisting that he's not going, but we already know from having seen the trailers that, indeed, he does end up making the trip with his wife.

A very large portion of the movie is spent in the counseling sessions conducted by Dr. Feld. As a viewer I found the sessions to be painfully long, repetitive, too scientifically technical and too verbally graphic. Is there an editor on board? Comedian Steve Carell is cast as the doctor. I kept waiting for him to break into a comedy soliloquy but it didn't happen; he plays it straight, which makes me wonder why he was chosen for the part.

Every session ends with an assignment given to the couple by the doctor. The first night's homework is simply to put their arms around each other. The assignments get more intimate with each passing day, but I would just as soon have been spared the details. Some of the scenes, particularly one in a darkened movie theater, are enough to make the moviegoer want to yell, "Get a room!" What's puzzling is that Arnold and Kay did have a room at the Econolodge. I wrote above that I was surprised Carell was chosen to play the counselor. I am equally surprised that Streep and Jones, two great actors who do not need the work, accepted the producer's offer to play these parts.

Streep is wonderful, as always. Some of her best acting moments occur without her speaking a word, such as when she's embarrassed by some of the self-help book titles she examines in a Barnes & Noble, or when she is visibly hurt by her husband's cold shoulder right after she got herself all dolled up before bedtime. Jones, on the other hand, let me down. (I never thought I'd ever write or say that.) He demonstrates his oafishness and his selfishness in scene after scene, both before and after the couple arrives in Maine. There is no range. We get that Arnold is a curmudgeon, but it keeps getting pounded into our heads. Surely there must be more depth to the man. Maybe his plus is that he doesn't physically abuse his wife, but he is guilty time and again of emotional abuse. I missed the self-assuredness and wit Jones usually gives us. Perhaps I should blame the script writer, but then again, nobody put a gun to Jones' head to take the part. Maybe he simply wanted to work with Meryl.