Hope Springs is a serious adult drama about the complications of intimacy in a long-term marriage. The movie provides a master lesson in great American character acting, but viewers are also invited to just kick back and enjoy the fun of watching famous, aging movie stars pretend to have difficulties in the sack. Spectacularly well matched and attuned to each other, Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones offer two of the finest performances of the year.
Streep and Jones play Kay and Arnold Soames of Omaha, sixty-somethings held together by little more than inertia in a marriage of 31 years that went sexless long ago. The Soameses could easily run out the clock for the next 20 years, inured to feeling. But in an outstanding feature-screenplay debut, TV-seasoned writer Vanessa Taylor (Alias, Game of Thrones) has created distinctive characters, two halves of a particular couple worthy of empathy and our moviegoing time. The tentative steps with which Kay gathers the strength to face her dissatisfaction and her loneliness feel true, not forced. Hungering for a revitalized marriage, she invites/asks/urges her husband to join her for an expensive week of intensive couples counseling. In Maine, no less — so far away. The lurching steps with which Arnold reluctantly acquiesces to his wife's request are, in Jones' care, a beautiful ballet of accommodation.
There are, not to worry, funny moments, charming moments and sweet fumblings. There are comic glitches in the erotic machinery to lighten the mood and bind the audience up in the ''comedy'' of relighting the old mojo even when wrinkles have come to stay.
The therapy scenes are just exquisitely acted and paced, with body language and slight facial gestures that speak volumes. The silences provide tension and intimacy. Steve Carell plays a solid straight man to allow the stars to stand out.
Without a single special effect or explosion, HOPE SPRINGS is the unexpected next movie with real punch.


EW.com
Copyright EW.com