AT THE MOVIES

 

With David Begelman

 

“Hope Springs”

 

Another Spin on the Marriage-Go-Round

 

 

“Hope Springs” purports to be a comedy about a middle-age couple hoping to revive a marriage that is in a state of extreme disrepair. Kay (Meryl Streep) is at her wits end with Arnold (Tommy Lee Jones). Her provisional solution to the impasse is a stab in the dark. With the couple’s accumulated life savings, she purchases airline tickets to Maine, and a slew of marital counseling sessions with a psychotherapist, Dr. Feld (Steve Carell).

It’s seemingly all out of a notebook suffused with what passes these days for a conventional wisdom about rectifying broken relationships. Go see a shrink, because he’s ultimately the one with a recipe for fixing the problem. Even if what he imparts is awash with traces of smugness and condescension distinguishing many in his profession. Even when his spin on things fairly drips with remnants of older Freudian yarns. It’s a diluted form of a once estimable religion that finds expression nowadays in weekend workshops run by gurus at hefty prices. Kay has to shell out $4,000 so that the veils of unknowing can be lifted, and the truth delivered in a blinding flash: she and her husband have not been having enough sex.

I beg to differ. Dr. Feld may have chanced upon a lucky strategy to relieve the deadlock, but he has misdiagnosed the essential problem. Kay and Arnold’s hang-up is not unfulfilled sexuality, but a much deeper atrophy of which it might be an eleventh-hour symptom.

Arnold’s zest for living in general has dried up like a discarded prune. He barely says a word to his wife. Even his morning meal of bacon and eggs prepared dutifully by her is a consistently formulaic affair, without variation. You can almost see Arnold having a nervous breakdown should Kay surprise him with a heap of Belgian waffles five minutes earlier than the appointed time for breakfast.

The couple sleeps in separate beds, and Dr. Feld’s suggestion that there is not enough sex seems about as apposite as prescribing snake-oil for a case of multiple sclerosis. Surprisingly, his advice works—although it occasionally takes on lurid forms, like kinky sex in darkened movie houses or prepaid hotel accommodations. But then again, the entire scenario is preformulated by Hollywood producers clueless enough to believe in Dr. Feld’s view of the world. On the other hand, he’s merely a shill for their inane take on what makes the world spin round.

What saves “Hope Springs” as a film is not its goofy premise that the remedy for long-term relationship problems of baby boomers is the same thing providing immediate gratification for a seventeen year-old with raging hormones. It’s watching Meryl Streep (the most accomplished of Hollywood actresses) and Tommy Lee Jones (likewise a remarkable trouper) do their thing. Too bad they had to be saddled with roles in a script that fairly drips with its own version of science fiction about troubled marriages.