How 'Hope Springs' Gets Couples Therapy Right
By Elisabeth LaMotte. Posted on .
When it comes to couples therapy, Hope Springs achieves an incredibly thoughtful and realistic portrayal of this process. While television series such as In Treatment and The Sopranos have done a wonderful job of portraying what its like to experience psychotherapy, a realistic portrayal is much harder to achieve in a film. And even harder to achieve with respect to couples.
Why? Because therapy is hard work and change is awkward and uncomfortable. This brand of work and discomfort is incredibly difficult to convey on an artistic level within cinematic time constraints. Herein lies something truly special and psychologically unusual about Hope Springs as a film, and Kay (Meryl Streep) and Arnold (Tommy Lee Jones) as a couple. Through superb writing (Vanessa Taylor), masterful direction (David Frankel) and world class acting, we see just how weird it can feel to try do something different. Even if two people adore one another, as Kay and Arnold clearly do, trying to break out of long-standing marital patterns is no easy feat. If two people have settled into a distant, disconnected marriage, they are both likely to get used to their separate lives (and their separate bedrooms). Whether it is one or both partners who want the change, couples are bound to cringe at various points in the therapeutic process. The sheer awkwardness of trying to break out of relational dynamics that one has grown used to (such as sleeping in separate beds or not touching each other) can make couples want to give up all together. This is a phenomenon therapists frequently call "resistance".
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Therapists will say that sometimes clients need to get worse before they get better, and Hope Springs takes us down that road beautifully. Steve Carell nails his role as a couples therapist. Dr. Bernie Feld's earnest facial expressions, calm voice, groovy but conservative dress and and hokey but relevant cliches are perfect. For example, he tells Kay and Arnold that he metaphorically likens therapy to the process of correcting a deviated septum -- the nose needs to be completely broken in order to be fixed. When Kay and Arnold are mutually humiliated after their very best effort to rekindle romance comes close but ultimately fails miserably, Bernie reminds the dejected couple that they made it all the way to the five yard line during the evening in question, and that they were stuck way out in the stadium's parking lot when they first began.
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