Hope Springs

Directed by David Frankel

(PG-13)

***

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It’s something of a surprise that this comedy-drama about a marriage in need of repair turns out to be a “wryly affecting mid-summer treat,” said Lou Lumenick in the New York Post. There are missteps—a too-obvious soundtrack, an unnecessary sex scene. But great acting overcomes the flaws. “As ever,” Meryl Streep is superb as an unhappy wife who drags her curmudgeonly husband toa marriage-counseling retreat run by a famed psychiatrist in Maine, said Lórien Haynes in Movieline.com. Even so, it is Tommy Lee Jones’s performance as the husband that is “the real revelation,” because his character has to travel the longest distance—from emotionally shut down to fumblingly compassionate. If the movie didn’t include so much forced comedy, it might have been something special. Instead, its lurches in tone are often “excruciating.” Yet part of what makes Hope Springs hard to watch is that the emotions onscreen hit so close to home, said Charlie McCollum in the San Jose Mercury News. That’s what makes it a film worth seeing. “It’s going for the truth in people’s lives, and, for the most part, it finds it.”