David Frankel (2012)
Hope Springs is about the thirty-one-year-old marriage of a middle-class couple in Omaha. Arnold Soames is a partner in a firm of accountants. His wife Kay works part-time in a charity shop but she’s mainly a housewife. When Arnold comes home from work, he eats the meal that Kay’s cooked and dozes in his armchair watching golf instruction videos. The couple sleep in separate bedrooms. He gives her a perfunctory kiss as he leaves each morning but they have next to no physical contact, conversation or shared interests. Kay seems defeated but she’s desperate enough to look in the library for books on how to retrieve the sexual side of your marriage, finds one by a Dr Bernard Feld and uses part of her own savings to book herself and Arnold onto an intensive course of counselling sessions with Feld in Great Hope Springs (which was the film’s working title) in Maine. Gruff, curmudgeonly Arnold ridicules the idea. It’s a pleasant surprise to Kay that he even turns up to take his seat beside her on the plane to Maine. Things don’t improve when they get to their destination and into the therapy sessions.
Or don’t improve for a while anyway. This is a middle-to-lowbrow Hollywood product so the couple tortuously revive their sex life. (Their chronic inability to share other things is, of course, ignored at the business end of the story.) Over the closing credits we see the Soames realising what Kay has told Dr Feld is her fantasy – renewing her marriage vows to Arnold in a ceremony on the beach with their two children (and a new grandchild) along with Feld (and his wife?) (This sequence has the look of end-of-shoot mucking about – more enjoyable for the cast than the audience.) Hope Springs, written by Vanessa Taylor, is nothing if not formulaic. The formula is a calculated balance of laughter and tears, and that calculation should grate on your nerves. Yet this is a really enjoyable movie – more enjoyable than it would be as either a broader comedy or a more wrenching drama. The poster and trailer for the film, which has performed solidly if unspectacularly at the North American box office, suggest a straightforward comedy. Wikipedia and IMDB categorise it as a romantic comedy-drama. More than one review I’ve seen terms Hope Springs, with a hint of disparagement, a dram-edy. Better a dram-edy than a com-a, though. There was never a moment when I thought I would fall asleep.
Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones have never been on screen together before and the partnership is all you hope for, in spite of the limitations of the material. Their comic resourcefulness comes as no surprise but what’s most impressive is their ability to delineate the particular intelligence of the person they’re playing – precisely and without strain or condescension. Jones has the more obvious opportunities for laughs and takes them, usually with dry-as-a-bone line readings. He looks almost cartoonishly funny – shorter and squatter than you expect, with an exaggerated paunch and, Sally thought, perhaps weights in his shoes to emphasise Arnold’s plod. A different kind of weight that Tommy Lee Jones brings to the role turns the couple’s marital problems into something more – and more upsetting – than lack of sex. Arnold is not just a grumpy old man but a verbal and domestic bully. It’s his idea that the couple buy each other joint presents for Christmas and anniversaries – a new boiler, a cable television package with, as Kay assures their kids when they come to dinner, ‘a lot of channels’. I can’t do justice to what Meryl Streep does with a line like that or with Kay’s answer to Dr Feld’s question about what sex between the couple used to be like: ‘It was usually the same’. The comedy and misery in these lines are perfectly fused; Streep delivers them in what seems like a dead tone but with amazing impact. David Frankel isn’t much of a director but it’s striking that, as in The Devil Wears Prada, he gets Streep to register especially strongly when she’s speaking quietly. As usual, there are people (including Sally) who find her busy and artificial. I think it’s fascinating to watch Meryl Streep playing with such sympathetic zest a woman who knows she’s unassuming – and how irritating that quality can be.
The therapy sessions have a tension deriving from the rhythms that Frankel develops and an excitement born of the quality of the acting of all three participants. Steve Carell is scrupulously straight as the therapist; that’s naturally a little frustrating and there are times when Carell seems merely to be keeping the lid on. But I liked the slight suggestion of charlatanism that hangs about Feld, and which gives an amusing force to Arnold’s prejudices against him. There are a few daft in-jokes: reference to a deviated septum, which Meryl Streep is supposed to have; when Kay and Arnold go to the cinema it’s to see Le dîner de cons – remade as Dinner for Schmucks with Steve Carell in 2011. The soundtrack includes a couple of wimpy songs and Theodore Shapiro provides a matching score.
16 September 2012
