60 And Sexless, But ‘Hope Springs’ Eternal

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.