LITTLE ROCK — Grown-ups are a community much under served by Hollywood, and so there might be a temptation to overpraise David Frankel’s Hope Springs simply because it provides us an alternative to the noisy crashing things that roost in the cineplexes in the summer. It’s not a loud film, or even a broad one. It is nominally a comedy, but with a few exceptions its humor is low-key and derived from character. It is so devoid of outsized scenes that some people might be puzzled - it does not look like those things they know as movies.
It does harness the star power of Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones, who play a more or less ordinary middle-class couple from Omaha, Neb. He’s a partner in an accounting firm, she clerks at Coldwater Creek, probably more for the employee discount and the need to get out the house than out of any genuine economic need.They live in a modest but comfortable two-story house with a nice kitchen but window air conditioners in their separate sleeping quarters.
Their marriage is, if not dead, at least dormant after 31 years. Their children are gone. He - Arnold - watches the Golf Channel. She - Kay - wants more. He thinks this is just the way that lives run, that they have attained whatever happiness they could, and that all that remains is gradual decline. Things will fail. All that’s left, as Townes Van Zandt had it, is waiting around to die.
But if Arnold is resigned and weary, Kay still has some fight left in her. She goes online, checks out this Dr. Phil sort, Dr. Feld (underplayed with a surfeit of gentle reasonableness by Steve Carell) who specializes in rehabbing marriages. She draws out her savings and signs them up for a couple of weeks of counseling at his office in the remote, picturesque and completely fictional coastal New England village Great Hope Springs.
Arnold doesn’t want to go. He suspects the doctor is an expensive charlatan. But he relents, because otherwise there would be no movie.
In the hands of lesser actors, Hope Springs might be the worst kind of domestic potboiler, a platform for mugging and slow burns. Instead Streep (thankfully unburdened by exotic accent or the need to impersonate a historical figure) and Jones drill down into their types and find something genuine and surprising in their characters.
They manage to become complex, even as the script checks off the boxes of the standard romantic comedy list. Jones especially is able to make Arnold - who on the page seems a crusty cheapskate with a tin ear for poetry - into something more than the repressed and oppressive monster the movies have trained us to receive. Arnold is in a world of hurt, he’s damaged and scared and you believe in him even when his lines sound like movie lines. He sounds like he might be trying to sound like Tommy Lee Jones.
And Streep simply is Kay, a woman who is perhaps not quite so dull as she herself believes. She is desperate, and she knows it, and she even realizes the essential foolishness of her mission, but she only knows she can no longer do nothing.
Immediately after the screening, when I was first asked about this film, the word that first surfaced in my mind (floating up through the inky waters like the tile of a Magic Eight Ball) was “adorable.” Because there is something in the pairing of Jones and Streep (together at last after all these years) that feels sweet and apt and the very idea of folks of a certain age consorting and canoodling on screen seems “cute.”
But upon reflection, I realized I liked the movie better than that, even as I note its mildness, some painfully on the-nose music cues (“Everybody Plays the Fool?” Really ?)and a certain lack of originality.
I think it has everything to do with the quality of the acting and the faith of the filmmakers to trust the audience. While Hope Springs doesn’t pass up many opportunities for cheap laughs, it isn’t relentlessly vulgar or cruel to its characters. There is an audience for it, possibly a substantial one.
It’s just nice to see grownups in the movies for a change.
Hope Springs 86 Cast: Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones, Steve Carell, Elisabeth Shue, Jean Smart Director: David Frankel Rating: PG-13, for mature thematic content involving sexuality Running time: 100 minutes
MovieStyle, Pages 29 on 08/10/2012