**** 1/2 out of *****
Running time: 100 minutes
MPAA rating: PG-13 for mature thematic content involving sexuality
The misleading advertising campaign for Hope Springs creates the impression that it is a light-hearted comedy in the vein of Meryl Streep’s recent film, It’s Complicated. Perhaps the filmmakers lacked confidence in the material, but after seeing this superb family drama one can’t help feeling that the campaign was a betrayal of the film’s true nature. For the film is a serious-minded (if often humorous) exploration of a marriage gone wrong.
There are plenty of laughs to be found when a frustrated wife (Streep) forces her husband (the magnificent Tommy Lee Jones) to sign up for an intense one-week counseling session to revive the spark in their 31-year marriage. But the humor is just one element in the insightful script by Vanessa Taylor as she gets into the minds and under the skin of the desperately unhappy couple whose life together has devolved into a loveless, alienated husk of a marriage.
Working with director David Frankel, who guided Streep through her amazing channeling of Vogue editor Anna Wintour in The Devil Wear Prada, Streep is matched every step of the way by the always intense Jones. What makes this film so touching, so involving and ultimately so real are Streep and Jones’ abilities to play with and off each other in conveying such a wide range of emotions. It’s the equivalent of seeing two great chess masters or two ballet dancers at the peak of their careers, each pushing the other to the very limit of their abilities.
While it is Streep whose problems dominate the first half of the picture, Jones’ concerns gradually come to light as the story progresses. This transforms the picture from being the study of a woman isolated by her husband's lack of interest to the much more meaningful, and absorbing, saga of a couple’s journey from alienation to confrontation to communication and the chance of a future together.
