Hope Springs Is A Marriage Counseling Movie Filled With Clichés And Lacking In Spark.

The Good: Moments of realism, Good casting
The Bad: Predictable, Nothing extraordinary on the acting front, Set-up with all of the obvious elements for a troubled marriage.
The Basics: Hope Springs is intense and real, but hardly entertaining and not terribly original.


Marriage is a complicated thing. Marriage is complex and there have been problems in marriage since the institution was formed. I have news for you: with the proliferation of information, greater communications options, and a rise of technology without any corresponding psychological growth in the human animal, marriages are only going to get more complicated. As Baby Boomers age, Hollywood is working to find works to get their dollars and aging marriages are one of the topics for films competing for Baby Boomers’ money. The Brits beat Hollywood to the punch with The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (reviewed here!), but last year was a good year for the first big push toward courting mature viewers. The biggest release in that regard was Hope Springs.

In courting Baby Boomers, the major studios seem to have forgotten that Boomers have seen and experienced a lot, especially in cinema, and have had more outlets than the prior generations. So, Hope Springs might have been audacious a decade or three ago, but it seemed far more formulaic and predictable now. Hell, the Boomer crowd had the money and interest to keep In Treatment on the air for several seasons; did Vanessa Taylor think Boomers hasn’t seen or known about it? Even without actually watching episodes of In Treatment, with my cinematic and television history, Hope Springs seemed more familiar than fresh to me.

Kay and Arnold have been married for thirty-one years and they now have adult children, an empty home, and separate beds. Kay is extremely sad about that fact, while Arnold seems to accept the relationship with indifference. Kay dips into the couple’s CD to buy tickets to Dr. Feld’s intensive marriage therapy in Maine. When it becomes clear that Kay will leave without him, Arnold gets on the plane with Kay and, following her first victory, they begin the difficult process of marriage counseling with the straightforward Dr. Feld.

Over the course of the week that follows, Arnold and Kay begin talking about all the things they never actually talked about, spending time together, practicing all the things they used to do, as well as trying to do the things they always wanted.

Hope Springs is not bad, but it is nothing special and certainly nothing original. Arnold is characterized as an emotionally-reticent man, whose sex with his wife was pretty much limited to the missionary position. Kay is a sexually-repressed housewife whose inexperience and lack of communication contributed in part to the disintegration of their marriage. And so much initially changes when Dr. Feld just has the two start talking honestly. Communication, of course, being a cornerstone of a healthy marriage, it is usually the element that is most damaged in a relationship in decline and Hope Springs wisely starts with that.

But, as the film goes on, Hope Springs seems less impressive on that front. Dr. Feld never pushes Kay and Arnold so hard that they actually develop a willingness, desire, and ability to communicate with one another. In fact, for an “intensive therapy” experience, Dr. Feld’s office is incredibly safe, unthreatening, and (ultimately) unchallenging. He addresses the surface problems – the effects – instead of the causes of the problems in the marriage and those who have a lot of experience in psychotherapy will find Hope Springs far less impressive than writer Vanessa Taylor and director David Frankel might want. When you’re trying to appeal to the generation that invented “self-help books,” this seems like a critical flaw.

On the acting front, Hope Springs is cast well within the ranges of each of the main three performers. Steve Carell, whose casting as therapist Dr. Feld might have seemed audacious right after he came off The Daily Show, but given works like Dan In Real Life (reviewed here!) where he has played much more dramatic roles, this is not at all surprising for him. Similarly, Tommy Lee Jones playing a grumpy older man who is efficient at his job, but is emotionally reticent has been done to death. In fact, it was done in 2012 prior to the wide release of Hope Springs with Men In Black III (reviewed here!).

As for Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence had nothing to worry about before the Golden Globes; the role of Kay is not one of Streep’s more impressive roles. In fact, it is reminiscent of some of her earlier roles where she was relegated to the supporting wife character who did not have the chance to shine, like The Deer Hunter (reviewed here!). For someone who has played big, dramatic, thematically complex roles, the mousy, reserved role of Kay seems like a huge step back for her. In other words, the role of Kay is well within her established range and she does not surprise the audience with her performance or her mastery of the character.

Now on DVD, Hope Springs has alternate takes, a gag real, and the like. They are fair bonus features for a fair movie. Hope Springs is not bad, it is just nothing new, exciting, or even particularly entertaining.

For other relationship movies, please visit my reviews of:
The Family Stone
Letters To Juliet
About Schmidt

5/10

For other movie reviews, please visit my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing.

© 2013 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
| | |

The Big Year Is Another Decent, Little, Movie

The Good: Moments of humor, Good acting, Moments of character
The Bad: Predictable plot and character arcs
The Basics: The Big Year showcases some wonderful acting from Steve Martin and Jack Black, but is ultimately an unambitious story packaged with great nature footage.


I have, in the interest of full disclosure, no real interest in birds or birding or even movies that are about competitions. I don’t think I have ever seen an entire episode of The Amazing Race even. I am, however, discovering that I like the works of Steve Martin more and more and as a result, I was eager to watch The Big Year. The Big Year became an opportunity for my wife and I to have a long-distance date, which was pretty nice. I picked up the film on DVD, she got a copy in Michigan and we watched it together, from 500 miles apart.

Usually, my personal anecdotes serve only as introduction, but in this case, it is germane. One of the important themes of The Big Year is loneliness and it’s a lonely thing to be apart from the one I love. Watching The Big Year, I would have expected more of a tug, given how many characters experience frustration, emotional tugs, or outright loss based upon how their attempt to be the number one birder (bird spotter) in the world progresses. But I didn’t. The Big Year does what it sets out to do well, but not in a superlative fashion that really made me feel enthusiastic about recommending the film.

Was it bad? No. But it did not rise to extraordinary. It did not leave much for my wife and I to discuss afterward, either.

Brad Harris is a tech support worker near a nuclear power plant who has his eyes set on breaking Kenny Bostick’s 732 bird birding record. Single and using funds from his reluctant father, Brad prepares to squeeze in a year’s worth of bird watching for his “big year” while still keeping his job. Stu Preissler is finally retiring (this time for real) in order to have his big year after a lifetime of corporate deals and putting off his own wants. Financially solid, he is supported in his endeavor by his wife, who understands birding is important to him, but does not share his passion for it. Kenny Bostick, for his part, feels utterly insecure in his new world record. So, despite his wife Jessica taking fertility treatments so they might have children, Kenny rushes off to “set the pace” for the new year.

What follows are a series of encounters as Brad and Stu meet and become friends, while denying that they are actually working on their big year. Stu takes Brad under his wing and keeps the young man from starving on the road. He also encourages Brad to talk with birder Ellie, who does all sorts of bird calls. Kenny’s paranoia soon begins to show and he begins playing games and making maneuvers in order to keep Brad and Stu off-guard and on the path away from breaking his world record. In the process, Brad and Stu experience betrayal, loss, and come to understand just what is truly important to each of them.

What is enjoyable about The Big Year is watching how each of the three main characters deal with the tugging on them by outsiders. Clearly, all three of these men are happiest when they are birding. Stu seems the most financially set for pursuing his big year and though he misses the birth of his grandson, he continues with his plan to bird. Even the incompetence of his two former employees, Jim and Barry, is not enough to distract him for very long. By the time the film is nearing its end and Jim and Barry beg him to return to his business as the new CEO, it is obvious well in advance how he will respond. In fact, Steve Martin’s delivery is so clear as Stu that it is shocking he needed to make it explicit for Jim and Barry!

At the other end of the spectrum is Brad. Brad is trying to do all of the travel for the year on $14,000. At the outset of the film, he hits his father up for $5,000 and his mother volunteers to be Brad’s travel agent. Brad struggles and when his work actually needs him to stay for a weekend, he does so only to be able to fund the next leg of his trip. The romantic subplot between him and Ellie is appropriately cute and heartbreaking and makes for a nice way for Stu to help guide Brad. Brad is one of the only characters Jack Black has played with whom it was easy to empathize.

Experiencing far more complicated emotions – though Brad has to deal with his father’s failing health and Stu wrestles with what it means to be absent from the lives of his wife, children and new grandchildren – is Kenny. Kenny quickly realizes that the top is a very tenuous place and his journey rapidly transforms from a something enjoyable into a desperate attempt to hold onto what he has. The choices Kenny makes are often disappointing or disturbing and even from five hundred miles away, I could hear my wife yelling “no!” when Kenny had the opportunity to be at the right place at the right time with his wife.

The acting in the Big Year is the film’s superlative aspect. While much of the narrative has the feel – and even look – of a Wes Anderson film, David Frankel gets decent performances out of Jack Black, Steve Martin and Owen Wilson. The only questionable moment of performance in The Big Year could even be written off as a character moment! As Jack Black’s Brad searches for his father in a snow-covered woods, he does not look down at the snow for tracks, he keeps looking up into the trees. That was a baffling choice to me, from a rational perspective, but it could make sense for a guy who is always used to finding what he is looking for up in the air, as opposed to down on the ground.

Now on DVD, The Big Year has both the theatrical and extended cuts, but no other bonus features. That makes it much easier to recommend for a viewing, than for one to buy to add to their permanent collection.

For other works with Owen Wilson, be sure to visit my reviews of:
Hall Pass
Marmaduke
The Fantastic Mr. Fox
The Darjeeling Limited
Night At The Museum
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
The Royal Tenenbaums
Zoolander
Meet The Parents
Bottle Rocket

5.5/10

For other movies, check out my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2012 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
| | |

Dear Anne Hathaway, Are You Aware Your Character Was Raped In The Devil Wears Prada?

The Good: Costumes, Moments of acting
The Bad: Characters make little sense, Plot is predictable, Mood
The Basics: When Andy Sachs moves to New York City to work for a magazine, she ends up as a personal assistant to a ruthless editor in a pointless movie.


For those who might not follow my movie and music (and I suppose even my tea reviews), I tend to review things from a feminist perspective. I am a proud liberal who believes in freedom over government control and equality over classes. I also tend to review movies in such a way that does not reveal the end or elements that come in near the end, out of respect for those who might actually go and see the film I am (or am not) recommending. After all, there's still the sanctity of those "I am your father" moments in cinema and I work to maintain them. However, after seeing The Devil Wears Prada, my feminist outrage is overriding my cinema integrity argument and as a result, this review will reveal one or two elements that come into the movie rather late. You're warned up front and as a result, I'm going ahead because the problems I experienced with the movie were pretty solid, but they do reveal one or two late elements in the movie.

After seeing Anne Hathaway in Get Smart, I decided that I could stand to see a lot more of her works. As such, I put in requests at my library for anything of hers I could find on DVD. The first film to arrive was The Devil Wears Prada, a movie I had not caught in the theaters, nor read even a single review of. As I understand it, the movie is based on a book and with my usual disclaimer, this is a review of the film as a standalone project. If my gripes with the movie are addressed in the book, that's fine, but as far as the movie goes, this is what we have.

Andrea "Andy" Sachs is a graduate of Northwestern University who has moved to New York City to get a job as a reporter, rather than go on to Stanford Law. In New York City, Andy hangs out with her boyfriend and two friends until the day she is able to score an interview at Runway. Runway, a fashion magazine, is a far cry from where Andy wants to be and instead of dealing with content, she is granted a job as personal assistant to the editor, Miranda Priestly.

Miranda is pretty much the archetypal domineering female boss who is demanding without any sense of humanity. Andy rejects the lifestyle of the size two to four crowd while in her service until one demand after another wears her down. In the process, she tries to fulfill her own goals, but mostly runs petty errands for a woman who does not care about her or her ambitions.

The Devil Wears Prada reminds the viewer that it's tough to do a good "coming of age" story today because there have been so many of them done before. This is essentially the story of Andy Sachs learning to stand up for herself and follow her own dreams and the entire movie is the brief period she spends getting off track. This sort of selling out to the fashion industry might seem remotely interesting if it hadn't already been done. Indeed, Just Shoot Me! managed to do the essential plot of this movie in a single half-hour episode.

And going into The Devil Wears Prada, the viewer has pretty much the right idea of where the movie is going. One of three things will happen by the end of the movie: Andy will either learn the value of being independent and stand up for herself and her dreams, Andy will sell out and become the next Miranda and/or Miranda will soften into an actual human being and learn a valuable lesson on her own. From the very beginning, Miranda is characterized as someone who has been established for quite some time, so fortunately the film does not disappoint the viewer with the family-friendly, "antagonist gets what's coming to them" ending. As for the other two options, I won't ruin that "surprise."

The thing is, in the process of getting mired in the corporate and style worlds, Andy becomes an utterly unlikable character. While we might be rooting for her from the outset, by the time she happily asserts to Nigel that she is now a size four, she is utterly unlikable and the viewer lacks any empathy for her. She has made her choice and whether or not she chooses to change back, she has spent the lion's share of the movie as a jerk and frankly, we want to see characters who are more interesting than that.

But even more troubling than that is where the movie goes and fails to go while getting there. In the process of meeting Miranda's ridiculous demands, Andy finds herself dealing with a writer named Christian Thompson. Christian helps Andy get such things as the unpublished "Harry Potter" manuscript for her daughters to read and he is characterized as both an opportunist and a guy who genuinely likes Andy. In fact, it is almost easy to overlook the degrading way he accepts that Andy has a boyfriend and does not express interest in the personal or professional advances he makes with her.

But the moment The Devil Wears Prada fell into the "not recommend" category for me was the moment Christian rapes Andy and the movie brushes it off like it's just not a thing. Stereotypes and confusion exist in societies that do not make their rules or mores clear. Laws and legal precedents help to make rules clear, even when society might not want to embrace them. Granted, there are differences in perspective, but legally, a woman who has an inability to consent is raped whenever a man takes advantage of that lack of consent. In Paris, Andy tells Christian "no." She says it clearly. He presses on. She admits she has had too much to drink. He presses on. She tells him she is confused and in a strange city, while backing off. He presses on. What comes next is rape and it's not a little technicality; drunk women do not have the capacity to consent and that The Devil Wears Prada simple expresses the sex as a natural, normal and LEGAL courting ritual is offensive and the antithesis of entertainment. This sort of "she really wanted it" type sexual encounter on screen makes a mockery of the established laws and basic tenants of decency and it's astounding that more feminists have not lampooned this film for just that reason.

Similarly, Miranda is utterly unlikable, re-establishing for the audience that in order to work in the "man's world," a female boss must play the bitch. In The Devil Wears Prada, though, it quickly becomes clear that Miranda is not playing. She is the archetype and the stereotype and there is pretty much nothing redeeming about her. Sure, she pays lip service to caring about her children especially as the film reaches its climax and plot events strain even that relationship. But, for example, Miranda chastises Andy for not getting her on a plane out of Florida when a hurricane hits and no planes are flying. The viewer sits and waits for Andy to just point out something like, "Hey, you can't always get what you want and I don't control the weather." People who are only used to getting what they want, like Miranda and Christian, are especially irritating to watch in movies.

The flip side of that, though, is that it soon becomes baffling that Andy decides to play the game as opposed to fight the established order of things, especially when it becomes clear that characters like Nigel and Emily are not the people she wants to become. Her refrain of "I'll stick it out because this could be a great springboard to other things" becomes tired the moment she starts dressing in the outfits and playing the game. The character putting up with all of the loathsome demands of Miranda only makes sense so long as it becomes clear that she has an external goal that will take her away from this life and that sense is quickly lost in the "Anne Hathaway looks fabulous" montages.

And Anne Hathaway looks fabulous, but it doesn't take much for a woman of her innate beauty to look good on film because, so long as the camera is loaded, it's going to catch what is there. Hathaway's opening shots are roughly the equivalent of saying that Betty (on Ugly Betty) is ugly because she wears glasses and braces. These are ridiculous (I'm trying not to overuse the word "stupid" in this review) arguments and from the first moments she hits the screen, Hathaway's Andy looks like she belongs even if her clothes do not match all those of the people around her.

As far as the acting goes, Simon Baker, whom I recognized from his work in the underrated movie Something New plays Christian and whenever he pops up he manages to be a little more than just a pretty face. Conversely, Stanley Tucci provides his usual solid performance as Nigel. Tucci's problem here is that he is given yet another seemingly monolithic role, like he had in Swing Vote where the character is given one genuine moment and the rest of the time, he is essentially an accessory to the powerhouse players. Tucci makes the best of it, though, and the lone scene where his character is humanized beyond the "type," he steals from Hathaway handily.

As for Anne Hathaway, it is easy to see why her star is on the rise. In addition to being young and beautiful (which is the Hollywood type), she is articulate and manages to make the little actions like Andy snickering or rolling her eyes at the absurdities of the culture the focal point of her character. As a result, the viewer misses them when they erode and are gone. Hathaway rightly does not re-establish those idiosyncrasies in the finale, though, which does make the viewer believe that Andy has undergone some profound and changing experience, even if it was not the most incredible story ever told.

But given that Meryl Streep is given the top billing, it seems like she ought to bear the brunt of the acting critique and it's too easy on this front. When I was in college, I worked at a department store and whenever I had to watch the Electronics Department over the worker's breaks, it seems I would get stuck watching the live-action 101 Dalmatians. That movie starred Glenn Close and Streep as Miranda is simple Streep doing Close as Cruella DeVille. There is nothing Streep brings to the part that Close didn't already do in that other role and my sense was director David Frankel could have saved some dough and used Close instead. Whether this is a stretch for Streep or not, I can't honestly say; I'm not as familiar with her work as I ought to be. But she plays the role consistently enough that the viewer does not like Miranda.

Unfortunately, this viewer ultimately did not like the movie. The more I write about it and consider it - especially the fact that in France or not, Andy is raped and the movie fails to address that in any way - the less I like it. Sure, it is stylish and well shot and the whole thing is easy enough to look at. But all of the main characters are robbed of their likability, no matter how they are initially established.

And I, for one, don't find that entertaining or worth watching.

On DVD there are behind-the-scenes featurettes, many of which repeat what is in the commentary track. The bonus features are pretty much what one would expect of this type of drama and they are neither a selling point, nor a detraction.

For works featuring Anne Hathaway, please check out my reviews of:
Anne Hathaway For Wonder Woman!
Love And Other Drugs
Family Guy Presents: It's A Trap!
Alice In Wonderland
Valentine's Day
Twelfth Night Soundtrack
Bride Wars
Rachel Getting Married
Passengers
Get Smart
Hoodwinked!
Brokeback Mountain
The Princess Diaries

5/10

For other film reviews, please be sure to visit my index page by clicking here!

© 2011, 2008 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
| | |