My daughter and I are headed out for some Steak & Shake cholesterol and then to see the new Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones film, "Hope Springs." Which is what mine is doing. I'm craving a cinematic triumph, or at least an honorable mention. The NY Times' Manohla Dargis is tenderly ambivalent about the film, but my taste in criticism runs more to A.O. Scott's--so there's some hope, right there.
I need this. We need this. We need a decent, popular movie. Western civilization cannot tolerate and shall not endure a monolithic stream of "Hunger Games," or anything like it. Every blockbuster of mindless abandon subtracts from the sum of our potential refinement--and I just can't take it anymore. Not every film needs to go boom or hatch unbelievable plots or, from credits to credits, contain nothing but witless dialogue.
I don't mean to sound like a snob. Then again, if sounding like a snob means possessing some taste, I would like to think I'm guilty as charged.
***
postscript: I'm still a bit shaken. The film was brutally comical as I sat in a horrified state of comical brutalization. PG 13? The movie ratings people must be on crack. I've never been so uncomfortable in all my life. I wouldn't allow my mother to see this film, and she's seven times past the recommended age limit.
The irony is that the film purportedly treats the subject of a happy marriage--what makes one, that is; and how two people can rediscover one--yet the sceenwriter quite obviously hasn't the first bloody clue about the matter. As an insensitive male brute I'm a slow learner when it comes to all things intimate, I'm sure, but if I learned anything transcendent in my years of increasing bliss with my beloved wife, it was that sex accounted for perhaps--perhaps--two or three percent of our genuine happiness. Caring and companionship and our daughter and great books and deep films and frivolous films and travel and outdoor breakfasts and ... you get the idea.
According to "Hope Springs," however, love and marriage are only as compatibly wondrous as a great blow job, which, unfortunately, a very frustrated Meryl Streep is incapable of delivering, to Tommy Lee Jones' even deeper regret. My sympathies.
Well, the acting was good, and there's always the littoral Maine village, which I would have been delighted--believe me, delighted--to see much more of. Other than that, you can understand my reservations.
If you're an unmarried young man, by all means hie your ladyfriend to this film, for spiritual guidance. Naturally I can't speak for married women, but if you're a happily married man of some emotional maturity? You'll probably leave the theatre wondering if there are any depths of superficiality that Hollywood can leave untouched.
Allow me, Nixon-like, to be perfectly clear. Do not take your 13-year-old daughter to this film. A 13-year-old boy? Hell, he was fantasizing about it three years ago in the bathroom. So who cares? But a daughter? No way. And if that sounds sexist or prudish, or worse, snobbish, again, I don't care.
Does this film have anything to do with an HBO movie about Franklin Roosevelt in the South trying to treat his polio with special spring waters? It starred Kenneth Branaugh as FDR and Cynthia Nixon as Eleanor. Anyways, hope you have a great time. I, too, confess to be a movie buff and movie snob.
Posted by: Melsouza | August 10, 2012 at 11:52 AM
"The Way"
Posted by: japa21 | August 10, 2012 at 11:54 AM
I too, am on my way to see this film. I hear the acting is wonderful...and the story line is plausable..a long-married couple trying to hold it together. Some of us can relate.
Posted by: Sue Me | August 10, 2012 at 01:30 PM
I look forward to your review. The wife and I were thinking of taking in this one too and she is notoriously hard to get into a cinema seat.
Posted by: Peter G | August 10, 2012 at 03:41 PM
Re your postscript. Oh no. How disappointing. Saw the two of them interviewed on Charlie Rose and I thought we'd see the kind of story and Meryl Streep I remember from "Falling in Love" with DeNiro (much under-rated, to my mind).
PG-13. Sitting with my then 11 year-old son through the Clinton impeachment era cable vision news was when one learned that childhood innocence in this country can be sacrificed for power or money. None of it was PG-13, yet it was a constitutional crisis to be explained to sixth-graders. Still sickens.
Posted by: nancy | August 10, 2012 at 07:29 PM
My condolences and a recommendation: Any Tracy-Hepburn, "It Happened One Night," any Thin Mans, "The Seven Year Itch" if we need to show the young-uns how to treat sex tastefully, or when things are utterly dire and you need to call in the cavalry, there's nothing like the greatest film of all time: "Casablanca."
Posted by: John Haas | August 10, 2012 at 07:34 PM
O.K. saw the film and loved it...Tommy Lee Jones was my late husband in-the-flesh. It might be hard for a teenager to see and some scenes were somewhat embarrasing for me to watch...but what the hell..I'm old. It made me cry to think of the many marriages that end in this country because people don't try. Maybe it is a good sex-ed for kids to know that things do go stale after a while but the commitment is still there (or should be).
Posted by: Sue Me | August 10, 2012 at 08:57 PM
You just saved me at least thirty bucks if you include the popcorn and drinks.
Posted by: Peter G | August 11, 2012 at 08:40 AM