Hope Springs is sadder and more dramatic than the upbeat-romantic-comedy promised by the film’s trailer. Stars Tommy Lee Jones and Meryl Streep are heartbreaking as Arnold and Kay, empty-nesters who’ve lost the ability to connect with each other intimately.
They’ve been married for 31 years, haven’t had sex in four or five, and are stuck in the never-ending cycle of a routine in which she has his breakfast ready for him each morning before he can even ask for it and he falls asleep in front of the TV each night. They barely speak. They sleep in separate rooms, an arrangement that has existed for so long that when she asks about sharing his bed one night, he’s perplexed by the offer.
She’s miserable, and so she signs them up for intensive couples counseling in Maine. He’s resistant to spending that much money to travel far from their Omaha home for sessions he doesn’t think they need anyway. He’s not willing to admit that their marriage needs help.
But she guilts him into going, and they arrive in a picture-perfect coastal tourist town to meet Dr. Feld (Steve Carell). Given how little there is to the role, Carell is odd casting, nothing but a big name meant to help the movie’s box office. But he does the job just fine, and over the course of the week Arnold and Kay make some progress, then have some setbacks under the tutelage of the doctor, who assigns them a series of “sex-ercises.”
There are several nicely played comic moments, but the sessions with Dr. Feld get so awkward that much of the time I felt I was myself having to undergo marriage counseling. Given how genuine these moments seemed, I was a bit disappointed by the pat suggestion of the movie that there’s nothing that ails you that one good rogering can’t fix. (Though I suppose it’s true that it usually can’t hurt.)
