'HOPE SPRINGS'

'HOPE SPRINGS' (PG-13) (1 1/2 STARS)

Written by Vanessa Taylor
Directed by David Frankel
Actors: Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones, Steve Carell, Elizabeth Shue, Jean Smart

You know you are in trouble most of the time with a movie that has a generic title. You can expect a lot of dull predictability but with names like Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones attached you would expect a better movie to honor it's stars. "Hope Springs" is a phony, sappy letdown and one of the worst screenplays I have witnessed in a long time. This movie annoyed me more than almost any other movie this year. Streep and Jones try to save it and of course they are good but this story plays out like a simpleton wrote it.

"Hope Springs" is centered on a married couple, Kay and Arnold, who have been together for 31 years. The love seems to be gone from their marriage and in an opening shot that kind of bugged me Kay looks in the mirror to see what is missing. That is the first of many obvious, phony moments lifted out of screenwriting 101. The couple go through the same routine in the morning and they both come home at night, Arnold falls asleep in front of the TV and they go to their seperate rooms and beds. In another phony and obvious groaner joke at dinner one night Kay and Arnold tell their kids for their 31st anniversary they got the new cable package (Groan!).

Kay sees a brochure to a couple's retreat that provides therapy for strained marriages. The place is in a small Canadian town I think and this town has to be the phoniest Hollywood town in history. Arnold continues to be grouchy and here Tommy Lee Jones is playing a cariacture of himself and it annoyed me. He yells at Streep a lot in this movie and the story just lays on the phoniness until I surrendered. They go to this couple's guru played by Steve Carell in a surprisingly bland and dull performance, unusual for him. Carell is given a dull character and I know therapists are serious but it's Carell! You think that they would give his character something funny to say oh I don't know once in the movie?

The therapy sessions are terribly written and maybe it's because I find therapy sessions phony and marriage counselling ridiculous but this screenplay is bad. This is based on a self help book I guess but to think any therapist could save a marriage is a bunch of crap to me and the writing here supports my point of view. This is the same kind of ego centric crap that "Eat Pray Love" was which was a memoir written by the arrogant Elizabeth Gilbert. The sessions here are badly written, boring, annoying and if it wasn't for Streep and Jones I would have walked out half way through the movie. I just couldn't concentrate on this droning, too safe lesson on how not to make a movie about marriage.

"Hope Springs" was directed by David Frankel who directed "Dan in Real Life" with Steve Carell and now the critics who panned that under rated movie now owe me an apology. This is a moronic movie made by people who think they have the answer on how to save a marriage that has lost it's passion. Well, no one has the answer except the people who are actually the married couple. "Hope Springs" proves this because if the answer is in this movie then all married couples are screwed. I can't believe this but Meryl Streep is in one of the worst movies of the year so far.

P.S. For a better movie made by the same director please check out "Dan in Real Life" which is one of the most under rated movies of the last decade. For a real look at therapy and pshycology revisit the powerful "Ordinary People".