Hope Springs, 2012.
Directed by David Frankel.
Starring Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones, Steve Carell, Elisabeth Shue, Jean Smart, Ben Rappaport, Marin Ireland and Mimi Rogers.
SYNOPSIS:
After thirty years of marriage, a middle-aged couple attends an intense, week-long counseling session to work on their relationship.
It’s not often we get a grown up romantic comedy, but after seeing Hope Springs I think maybe we should start seeing more of them. Kay (Meryl Streep) and Arnold (Tommy Lee Jones) have been married for quite some time but over the last decade or so they have sadly grown apart. They have the same routine everyday, they barely talk or make eye contact and they even sleep in separate rooms. After so much of this Kay is fed up and wants to get their relationship back to how it should be. She sets up a week long couples counseling session in Maine with Dr. Feld (Steve Carell), who is well known for helping married couples. Once they arrive Kay is ready and willing to try anything to get their marriage back in order but Arnold thinks this isn’t worth the time or money making their trip all the more difficult.
Hope Springs doesn’t have the best of stories, but thankfully the performances from all three of the main actors are enough to carry the entire movie. Streep and Jones feel like a real couple and you really want them to get their marriage back together. Throughout the entire movie we get explore the humor and emotions of an older couple’s marital problems and I honestly don’t think it would have been half as good if Streep and Jones weren’t the stars. Steve Carell also does a great job in his role. Again we see another more restrained performance from him and that really seems to work out well for him.
Aside from the performances there isn’t much else here to rave about. For some reason the movie has a soundtrack that doesn’t suit it at all. There are times when songs play over scenes and they feel either like they shouldn’t be in that particular scene or it shouldn’t be there at all. The pacing was another thing I had a problem with – it just seemed to move to slowly at times, and the movie only lasts just over an hour and a half. Early on there’s some humor here and there but there comes a point where that fades out, making this one of the more decent-but-not-particularly-funny romantic comedies.
Hope Springs has great performances from Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones and Steve Carell that lift the movie above average. Aside from the performances, however, everything else is just average.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Jake Peffer
Originally published December 19, 2012. Updated April 11, 2018.
