Film Review | Hope Springs

The engine of most romantic comedies depends on the two leads who actively dislike each other falling for one another by roughly the film's third arc.

In the elderly-romance-dramedy Hope Springs, however, the couple in question - played with worthy and tender dramatic gravitas by Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones - place this pressure to be liked - even loved - squarely on the audience... and it's a commitment that's hard to sustain.

Not to say that director David Frankel (Devil Wears Prada) doesn't come into it with the best intentions, nor that he has an easy premise to enliven for the screen.

After all, this is the story of aging couple Kay (Streep) and Arnold (Jones) who - as we learn in the quietly depressing pre-credits sequence - not only sleep in separate beds... but in separate rooms.

While Arnold seems content with the comfortable-but-dull nature of their 31-year marriage (clue: he's an accountant), the timid Kay is on the verge of cracking.

One day, while desperately hunting for self-help books that might help restore the spark to their ailing relationship, Kay comes across a volume by alternative marriage-cum-sex councellor Dr Feld (Steve Carell), who is renowned for his therapeutic resorts for couples.

Kay only just manages to convince her set-in-his-ways husband to take the trip, and Arnold proves to be an uncooperative partner. Will his failure to open up about their marriage (and - shock, horror - sex life) serve as the final nail in the coffin of the couple's fading passion for each other?

The problem with Hope Springs isn't the premise, as such - romance among the aged, while cringe-worthy to some, remains a perfectly valid, and under-represented, Hollywood sub-genre - but it's that the central couple are just too hard to like for a lot of the running time.

The fragile Kay verges on being pathetic, while her husband is often nothing more than a whiny, unpleasant bully (shockingly, his wife actually points this out, but the observation is left to peter out as the couple ping-pong from one therapy session to another).

Another way of looking at this, of course, would be to assume that Frankel and co. are simply working with emotions and characters appropriate to their story - after all, the couple seem to be falling out of love with each other, so it would hardly be logical for us to be charmed by them at their lowest ebb. But this doesn't make for a fun 40-something minutes, and by the time their personalities begin to glimmer through the lumbering sad-sacks we'd been saddled with up until that point, it may just be too late.

But Streep and Jones certainly give it their best shot - and again, there's an ideal decorum here with the characters they play, who also end up trying perhaps a little too hard to reinvigorate the romance they once had. Jones is somewhat typecast, though unlike, say, his phoned-in straight-man foils in the Men in Black trilogy, here we get to see him unpeel some of the persistent layers of grumpy for a glimpse of what's really behind all the bad attitude and pain.

But it's Streep who's the most refreshing to watch here. Fresh from the nails-on-chalkboard shrillness of The Iron Lady, it's nice to see her put the show-off acting on the backburner and play vulnerable without indulging in any unwarranted histrionics.

Perhaps she sniffed early on that, noble though Frankel's intentions may have been, his execution was hardly Oscar worthy?