Butler's Cinema Scene

“HOPE SPRINGS” My rating: B+ (Opening wide on Aug. 8)

100 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Nobody tells a joke in “Hope Springs.” Nor do they ever try to elicit a laugh from the audience.

And yet this latest film from director David Frankel (“The Devil Wears Prada”) is devastatingly funny.

For this you can credit screenwriter Vanessa Taylor (making her feature debut after a TV career that includes scripts for “Game of Thrones,” “Everwood” and “Alias”), who writes about marriage with so many dead-on insights that at a recent screening the lady behind me kept muttering “Been there. Done that.”

Taylor’s screenplay generates laughter through character and situation, not by tossing out clever lines. And the results are pretty wonderful, a grown-up comedy about grown-up problems that will undoubtedly resonate far and wide.

Of course it helps to have Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones interpreting your material.

As Kay and Arnold, who after 30 years have settled into a rut of remote cohabitation,  Streep and Jones create what may very well end up being iconic personalities, movie characters that take on an importance beyond that of a mere film. Kay and Arnold, one suspects, may do for sixtysomethings what Juno did for smart-talking teens.

In the movie’s cringeworthy opening scene, Kay dons a clingy blue nightgown, fluffs her hair, takes a deep breath, and goes down the hall to the former kid’s bedroom where her husband now sleeps. When she appears at his door, radiating insecurity like a space heater,  he looks up from his golf magazine, puzzled by this breech of their usual nocturnal etiquette.

When if finally dawns on him that she’s hoping for sex, Arnold does a pretty good job of backing up while lying flat. He’s clearly panicked at the prospect.

“We’re not 22 any more,” he dourly reminds her.

Kay returns to her room in weepy defeat.

This opening scene perfectly sets the tone for the rest of the film, which generates alternating waves of both humor and sadness.  For while you’re going to laugh a lot at “Hope Springs,” you’re probably going to find plenty of pain here as well.

Desperate to rescue her marriage, Kay uses her savings to buy two plane tickets and a week’s worth of therapy with a celebrated relationship doctor operating out of a small coastal town in Maine.  Arnold wants nothing to do with this scheme. Only the looming specter of divorce gets him on the plane, and even then he grouses endlessly.

Streep’s transformational abilities are much in evidence here. She seems to have gained 25 pounds to play Kay and has gone with makeup that, rather than gussie-ing her up, actually dowdies her down. It’s a stunningly egoless performance from our greatest living film actress.

Jones, whose face is starting to look like the moon’s surface after an asteroid storm, is so effective as the grumpy, chauvinistic, narrow-minded Arnold that one would be forgiven for utterly disliking him. Yet beneath the craggy features and oversized glasses (he resembles the Ed Asner character in the animated “Up”) Jones shows us that Arnold is terrified of getting back into the saddle.

This is basically a three-character play, the third character being the therapist, Dr. Feld, who is played by Steve Carell.  Like me, you’ll probably expect some deft comic moves from Carell. No way. He plays the role  as if he were doing O’Neill…which is to say, absolutely straight. It’s the right choice.

I’ll even predicdt that in the wake of “Hope Springs” we’ll see an increase in business for  marriage counselors all over America.

b