Hope Springs

1/4

Starring: Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones, Steve Carrell

Rated PG-13 for Mature Thematic Content involving Sexuality

One could argue that this film is for older people and the reason I didn't like it is because I couldn't relate to it.  I disagree.  Love, and the fight to keep it, is a universal conflict, and especially with a talented cast like this, it should have been great.  Surprisingly it is not.  In fact, it is one of the worst of the year (probably a first for Streep).

Kay (Streep) is extremely unhappy.  Her husband Arnold (Jones) doesn't pay any attention to her except out of habit.  He's also a grouch and a pessimist.  In a desperate attempt to save their marriage, Kay enrolls them in an intensive couples therapy in Maine.  It's lead by Dr. Feld (Carrell), who is going to get them to open up about their need for intimacy.  Easier said than done.

It's easy to define the problem with the film: the script.  It's extremely shallow.  Although Dr. Feld asks intimate questions, there's no real follow through, and to begin with they're not that insightful.  Kay longs for passion but Arnold is too macho to show it.  Instead of portraying this as a light drama, director David Frankel thinks it's serious and groundbreaking.  Maybe it's because he is primarily known for directing comedies (he made "Marley & Me" and "The Devil Wears Prada"), but his impression of Vanessa Taylor's script is dead wrong.  It's shallow and derivative.  Neither Taylor nor Frankel can decide what they want this film to be: a tearjerker, a light drama or a heavy meditation on love and intimacy.  By trying to be all of them it ends up misfiring spectacularly.

The film's biggest crime is wasting the talent of its three stars, all of whom deserve better.  Streep does what she can, but with the shallowness of her dialogue and Frankel's poor direction, there's little she can do.  Ditto for Tommy Lee Jones.  He has some meat to chew on, but not enough.  Arnold is one of those macho guys who doesn't talk about his feelings to avoid appearing "soft" or something.  Jones makes a game try, but that's a cliched character and he can't make it original.  Steve Carrell is the only one who does anything with his character because he's the only one with something to do.  He calls out the elephant in the room and directly asks questions that Kay and Arnold need to talk about but are too nervous to do so.  He also plays the role straight; this is a purely dramatic role for him.  Carrell can do drama, but like his co-stars he's given nothing to work with.  Elizabeth Shue appears for, like, two scenes playing a bartender, but she's given even less to do.

There are two curiosities about this movie that I must mention.  First, the film has been marketed as a romantic-comedy.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  There aren't many attempts at humor in this movie, and they aren't successful.  To laugh at the jokes in this film, you have to still be living in the 1950's, where sex is a dirty word.  To a person such as myself, who thinks that sex is a beautiful and essential part of life, the humor is unfunny and immature.  The second is the film's PG-13 rating.  Even if the film weren't so dreadful, it's not a film that teens would be interested in in the first place, making the desire to earn the rating a curiosity.  The second thing I'm wondering is what on Earth persuaded the MPAA, who as we all know, is extremely skittish about sex, gave this film such a rating.  The film is surprisingly graphic, including an (covered up) blow job.  I've seen movies get NC-17 ratings for less.

In a way, "Hope Springs" is one of the toughest kinds of movies to watch.  With a zero-star movie (which is what this would be had it not been for the valiant, but futile, efforts of its cast), at least it provokes me into actively hating the movie.  In this case, I was simply waiting for it to end, and it takes far too long to get there.