Review: Hope Springs, Total Recall and How Far Is Heaven

In Hope Springs, Meryl Streep proves once again that not only can she play any woman, she can also play every­wo­man. She’s Kay, an unful­filled Nebraska house­wife, mar­ried for 31 years to account­ant Tommy Lee Jones and resigned to sleep­ing in sep­ar­ate bed­rooms and cook­ing him his eggs every morn­ing while he reads the paper. Except, she’s not resigned, she’s become determ­ined. Determined to prove that mar­riage doesn’t just fizzle out after the kids leave home, that the past doesn’t have to equal the future.

So, she signs them both up for “intens­ive couples coun­selling” with friendly ther­ap­ist Steve Carell, in pic­tur­esque sea­side Maine. Jones is gruffly res­ist­ant, of course, and it’s his dead­pan sar­casm that prompts nost of the early com­edy (their fum­bling attempts to spice up their life provides the rest). As a com­edy, Hope Springs is extremely gentle – much more gentle than the trail­er would have you believe – but that gen­tle­ness suits the del­ic­ate sub­ject and the script (by Vanessa Taylor) actu­ally bur­rows in pretty deeply to a sub­ject that, I’m sure, is pretty close to home for lots of viewers.

Chief pleas­ure is watch­ing Jones and Streep show why they are the best in the busi­ness. If you go to see Hope Springs – and you can do a lot worse – then make a point of watch­ing the act­or who isn’t speak­ing. Director David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada) has the good sense to shoot much of the encoun­ters with Carell in two-shots – Jones and Streep on either side of a wide couch – and the reac­tions they have to the stor­ies the oth­er is telling are price­less and heart­break­ing to the extent I found myself won­der­ing what Bergman would have done with these act­ors. Hope Springs isn’t Scenes From a Marriage – it nev­er pre­tends to be – but it is a decent and often amus­ing take on a sub­ject Hollywood usu­ally ignores.

To any­one who has ever seen the Verhoeven/Schwarzenegger Total Recall (1990) then Len Wiseman’s remake will be utterly point­less. But it’s not meant for them, is it? It’s for the young­er gen­er­a­tion who wouldn’t be seen dead in the $2 sec­tion of the video store, and who don’t even care that it’s been done before. As every gen­er­a­tion needs its own Jane Eyre, appar­ently every gen­er­a­tion will now get its own Total Recall (and soon, Dredd and Robocop).

Regardless of how much regard you hold the ori­gin­al – and my regard for it is mar­gin­al at best – this ver­sion helped me to dis­cov­er pre­vi­ously untapped levels of dis­en­gage­ment but it did prompt some stray thoughts while Colin Farrell was try­ing to dis­cov­er wheth­er he really is a futur­ist­ic super­spy or not. Like, Bryan Cranston really needs to pick bet­ter pro­jects for his Breaking Bad hiatuses. And Wiseman really is a hack using this film mainly as a way to fur­ther invest­ig­ate the cine­mat­ic prop­er­ties of Kate Beckinsale’s ass (cf Underworld, et al).

Finally, a genu­ine tri­umph – NZ doc­u­ment­ary How Far Is Heaven, about a year in the life of the people of Jerusalem on the banks of the Whanganui river. Directors Christopher Pryor and Miriam Smith deftly com­pare the lives of the Sisters of Compassion (only three res­id­ent at the time of shoot­ing, down to two now) who have been liv­ing among the tangata when­ua since the order was foun­ded by Suzanne Aubert in 1892, and the spir­ited youth that they teach and counsel.

Two deeply held belief sys­tems co-exist in Jerusalem, and the beau­ti­fully pho­to­graphed film presents us with mul­tiple dicho­tom­ies – maori and pakeha, young and old, urb­an and rur­al – without tak­ing any sides itself. Destined to be one of the greats.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 29 August, 2012. Written in the depar­ture lounge of Auckland International Airport, just before fly­ing out to Telluride.