Change comes when Streep forces Jones to go with her to a
couples’ retreat in Maine for intensive therapy with a renowned marriage
counselor. Steve Carell plays him. A great deal of the film is devoted to these
three actors sitting in a therapist’s office. In mostly medium shots, Carell
calmly asks questions and then we cut across the coffee table to Streep and Jones
answering them. After each session, husband and wife walk around the small
tourist town and struggle to enact the intimacy challenges that the therapist
has just given them. This is a gentle, mildly comic drama that plays out. We
watch as two people who have not so much grown apart as grown uncommunicative
and then formed some deep ruts of routine try mightily to find their way out, a
way to rekindle the romantic sensations of the early years of their marriage,
times that are nearly thirty years in the past.
Though the film didn't ultimately win me over, I admire the seriousness with which director David Frankel
(of The Devil Wears Prada) and
screenwriter Vanessa Taylor (of several TV shows, most recently Game of Thrones) approach this material.
There’s little strain for humor or uplift. It’s a film on an even keel that
trusts good actors to bring the charm and conflict that will let the gentle
humor bubble up rather naturally. Though the humor is there at times, it doesn’t
arrive from the simple fact that older people might want intimacy or from a
point of view that mocks the couple’s dysfunctions. It’s essentially a quiet
and compassionate little movie. Streep and Jones give gentle
performances that go a little against type, but because they’re such total
professionals who take the whole thing as seriously as the director and writer,
it basically works.
She is a woman who has been closed off for so long that her
daring to take the journey to get help feels like a radical act. She’s willing
to do what it takes to make their marriage work. At first Jones seems to be
playing his typical craggy curmudgeon role. He complains about everything all
the way there and for a good while after they arrive. But soon it becomes clear
that he’s just as hurt as she is. In a career of tough guy wisecracking, here’s
a role that calls for real vulnerability. That he pulls it off so well is
further proof, if for some reason you need some, that he’s just as much a
national treasure as his co-star.
But for all there is to admire about Hope Springs, it sadly felt hollow to me. For all of the therapy
sessions and emotional revelations, we don’t really get to learn much about the characters. An intriguing scene
of the couple telling their romantic history to the therapist quickly becomes a
montage that’s basically the film in a nutshell. It’s interested in using its
concept for quick engagement rather than the kind of deeper, character-based
work that the actors appear more than capable of exploring. This is not a
season of the underrated psychiatrist show In
Treatment condensed into 100 minutes. No, this is a movie that’s content to
appear serious, show off solid performances, but never really dig in and turn
into something really special.
In what is probably the most disappointing narrative choice,
the therapist character never becomes a character at all. Forget that Carell, a
charming screen presence himself, fills the role. He has nothing to do. If the
film ever gives him a line of dialogue that is not related to asking the couple
questions or ever reveals anything about him other than his profession, I must
have missed it. There’s no good reason why he’s in the movie at all. Streep and
Jones might as well be talking to a robot or reading marriage advice out of a
how-to book. But who can blame Carell for wanting to act in the same room as
these legends? They’re certainly the only good reason to see the movie. And
even that’s not quite enough of a reason for me to recommend it in any way
other than half-heartedly.
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