The last time my 14-year-old daughter saw me and my wife being affectionate, she said, “Ewwww, old people kissing.” Now, I’m not so old — barely half a century. But let’s be frank. My daughter’s no different from many people whose objects of fantasy are young and freakishly fit. So even a mild, cutesy little comedy like Hope Springs about two sexagenarians trying to have sex can seem shocking, even transgressive.
Boy is it vanilla. It opens with middle-class department store clerk Kay (Meryl Streep) putting on a pretty nightgown and showing up in the bedroom of her accountant husband, Arnold (Tommy Lee Jones). Yes, they have separate bedrooms — but not because they’re on unfriendly terms. It’s just he snores and has a bad back and started sleeping down the hall and never returned to their bedroom. Now he receives her overtures with bewilderment and then quiet protestations of fatigue. It has been a while, and looks as if it’s going to be quite a while longer.
Writer Vanessa Taylor does a good job capturing the noncommunicative communication between two people who’ve been together for 30-odd years, their kids grown and gone. Well, Kay wants to communicate. But Arnold is shut down — nailed down. Searching desperately for advice, Kay happens on the work of a couples therapist named Dr. Feld (Steve Carell), and she books a week of sessions in the fictional town of Hope Springs, Maine. He mulishly doesn’t want to go — but she says she’s getting on the plane with or without him.
At first the laughs come from Tommy Lee Jones’ scowls and deadpan horror at the very idea of discussing sex: You’d think it was 1950 and Dr. Kinsey was asking questions that could get him arrested. But Carell is so earnest, so unironic, that he seems cleansed of all impure thoughts. If people didn’t know Carell from The Office, they’d probably go on the Web and look for Dr. Feld’s book.
There are many setbacks, but Kay and Arnold finally start to enjoy being together, to snuggle and so forth. But then they have to take it to the next level.