Hope Springs

Hope Springs

Rating 5 out of 10

Had a date with the lovely bride.  Riding motorcycles to breakfast and then a movie.  With it being a date movie you can be assured nothing will blow up and most likely no one will get shot.  She picked Hope Springs and with the laughs in the trailer it looked like a good choice.  It had a top notch cast including Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones and Steve Carell.  It's a decent enough movie.  It's just not a comedy.  There are a few funny parts, but mostly this is a wrenching drama about an aging couple stuck in a loveless marriage.

Kay (Streep) and Arnold (leather faced Jones showing his age) have been married for 31 years.  Never a hot and heavy type of marriage it has gone stale in the past five years when the kids left the house.  They are sleeping in separate bedrooms and hardly touch.  Kay decides she is ready for things to change.  Arnold likes the slow boring life and just wants to watch the golf channel before he falls asleep at night.  Kay finds Dr. Feld (Carell) who specializes in marriage counseling in the small Maine town of Hope Springs.

The acting is so good it's painful to watch this couple try to work things out.  Carell is very good as he tries to help them work through things.  Sadly for me things get harder to watch when they start working things out.  Both lead actors are in their late 60's and even at my age it's like watching my parents make out or worse.  While nothing too graphic is shown it still goes a little farther than I was comfortable seeing.

Not a bad movie if you are in the mood for a relationship movie and not expecting a comedy.  I'd say wait and rent it.