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Meryl Streep is a gift from the Gods to every film critic, filmmaker, and film lover on the planet. She is, quite plainly, the best working American actor on the screen of the last 35 years. (Daniel Day Lewis is a pretty darn close second, imho). But such hyperbole aside, reviewing a Meryl Streep movie is a difficult task for one reason and one reason only: Streep is one of a handful of actors in the world who breaks the cardinal rule of actors only being as good as the words that they are given. She is sublime, transcendent, and gobsmacking in every role she does, no matter how great or how awful the movie is. As such, I never know if I automatically give any movie in which she stars a favorable rating purely because The Legend is there to pick up the entire enterprise and make it watchable.
Hope Springs let her share the burden with two other accomplished and capable actors: Tommy Lee Jones and Steve Carrell. The basic premise of this movie from the director of The Devil Wears Prada is something you probably saw in an old episode of The Golden Girls or Everybody Loves Raymond: couples in their 60s who no longer feel that sexual yen for one another. It’s a common problem, to be sure, but is it something you want to see Meryl Streep engaged in exploring in a two-hour movie? Meryl Streep? Sitting on a toilet with a peeled banana in hand pondering how to, um, fit it in her mouth?
Kay (Streep) and Arnold (Jones) visit Doctor Feld (Carrell) to try to reignite the spark. The good news is that they both love each other. The bad news is that their bodies have become hollowed after decades of marriage, work, children, grandchildren, and the general malaise of Life. Unfortunately, the movie is too saccharine for its own good. We get the standard formula answer that the biggest and best way to tackle lack of sexual chemistry is to pack up the SUV, drive off to a retreat, and wander along the beach while Enya plays in the distance. Um. Okay.
Carrell plays his part ultra-dry, quite the opposite of the buffoonish men he’s played in most of his career, and it works amazingly well. Jones gets to snarl and be a gorilla on occasion, gently coaxing out the gentleman within by the end. And, of course, Meryl Streep makes a perfect pitch as Kay, a homely and sweet woman who in the hands of another actress would have been a plain bore. Streep gives her dimensions and layers that we don’t even know are there until late in the movie. I miss the crazy bitch of The Devil Wears Prada but kudos to Streep for taking a standard 60-plus vanilla mother goose and making her (gasp!) a sexual adventurer.
