Just get a goddamn divorce already
dir: David Frankel
Ye gods and little fishes, if there was one message, one singular plea this film seems to be making to us in the audience, it would be thus; like the words of the ancient Queen Elizabeth to the young Orlando in the film of the same name: "Do not wither, do not grow old".
But what choice do we have? No tablet, no serum, no surgery, nothing spares us from the entrenchment of our own awful habits and the miserly ways this film alleges we inevitably fall prey to, far beyond what age naturally and lovingly does to our physical forms.
See, that I can take. The falling apart of the body doesn’t frighten me, since I’ve been falling apart like a rusty cyborg with leprosy for, oh, simply ages now. I expect it just gets easier from here on in, and if I’m wrong, please have the decency not to tell me about it. It’s the emotional ossification, the hardening of one’s life into an unvarying repetitive routine that I find truly terrifying.
I’ll be the first to admit I’m not the target audience for this flick at all. AT ALL. This is clearly and completely aimed at middle-aged heterosexual married women, or older, horrified by what their husbands have become. Worst of all, the loss of the physical intimacy between herself and her husband is the cruellest blow, the last laugh, the hangman’s joke. And for this there is little comfort. Her husband is an angry robot, and, as she contemplates eternity, the last bit of which seems to take forever, she cannot think of any reasons why she should continue to endure his sexless and mechanical presence any longer.
Having pointed the truly obvious out, my sacred work now would be to point out whether anyone else on the planet could possibly “enjoy” or get anything out of a flick they shouldn’t be watching because that would upset the natural order of the universe.
Of course people should watch this. It’s got Meryl Streep in it. Meryl’s good in virtually everything she does, and that’s no bold claim.
The problem is, Meryl’s not playing the truly evil baroness Thatcher here, like she did in The Iron Lady; she’s not playing a strict nun, or a nuclear plant worker or the editor of Vogue or Ethel Rosenberg or Susan Orlean or Carrie Fisher or Lindy “Dingo Ate My Baby” Chamberlain. She’s just playing a woman, of her age, that Meryl would be if she didn’t have her talent or her confidence or her life. Kay’s just a nice, middle-aged woman from Nebraska or Minneapolis or Albuquerque, living her life of quiet desperation, wishing and hoping that there’s something more.
Her every day follows the same routine, looking after the oblivious Arnold (Tommy Lee Jones), who does everything exactly the same way every goddamn day of his life, including falling asleep in front of the tv watching programs about golf. They share no bed, nor do they seem to share the even solely affectionate physical comfort that most of us crave, and don’t want to live without. He doesn’t seem to mind, and she seems to mind terribly, as you would expect such a screenplay targeted with laser precision.
She thinks to herself, “well, maybe a session with a therapist could help things?” She pays for, despite her grunting husband’s opposition, for a week-long session with a therapist in Maine, giving Arnold an ultimatum: he doesn’t have to come along, but if he doesn’t, she’s going to murder him in his sleep, something which the audience has been begging for since we met Arnold.
He truly is horrible, a true piece of work. Not only do they give him the most boring career possible as an accountant, but they make him a miser, both financially and emotionally, and a man who grumbles unceasingly about everything and anything, complaining and complaining and complaining until you are begging for Meryl to pick something blunt and beat him to death with it.
In a flick like this, you have to convince the audience that there really is a problem there between the couple. It also helps if you care that they stay together (if that’s the dynamic they’re going for, you assume so, in that a marriage unbroken is the Ultimate presumed Good). The screenplay errs significantly, in that they go so far in establishing what an awful, soulless person Arnold is that a) you don’t want them to stay together, and can’t imagine any reason other than convenience why they should, and b) it’s impossible to accept the transformation required to make it feasible for such a troll to be able to do anything believable to ‘win’ his spouse back.
That’s the position the flick put me in, and then struggled vainly to convince me otherwise.
Their therapist Dr Feld (Steve Carell) is the perfect therapist for this flick: he’s insincere, he’s gentle, he doesn’t give a damn about them (nor should he), and his technique is basically to embarrass them into realising how far gone they are. With his shallow, supercilious remarks, he can help them measure the vast distance between them.
Kay keeps hoping that the therapist will magically say something that will make Arnold less of an arsehole somehow, and Arnold alternates between being completely unresponsive or entirely dismissive of everything the good doctor recommends. He doesn’t change. He seems solely motivated by the discomfiting sensation that, unless he humours Kay in some way, she’s going to leave him, and then there won’t be anyone to make his bacon and eggs in the morning, or hand him his briefcase on the way out, or listen to his tedious work anecdotes.
He is so emotionally shut down that I felt as if the flick was building towards some kind of revelation about something traumatic, but at least the flick does us the courtesy of not making this all about easy solutions and trite answers.
Although, if there’s humour in the flick, it comes from Kay and Arnold’s fumbling attempts to have sex again, which seem like they’re meant to be funny and uplifting, but mostly depressed the hell out of me.
It was really, really depressing watching this movie. In a way it’s a kind of horror movie. There but for the grace… etc we’re meant to think, but it’s also a brutal reminder of the habits we fall into, the assumptions we make that we, from then on, enshrine as fact and act accordingly ever after. The ways in which we take each other for granted, in long term relationships, the limitations on the experiences we are willing to share, the profoundly boring people we can become over time to each other unless we fight valiantly against it, all of this is embodied in the film.
And the solution? I’m not so sure the flick says there is one. The flick posits, despite what I said, easy answers, but ones that aren’t easily delivered upon. How do you rekindle sexual desire for someone for whom you no longer feel desire? Well, just feel it, because you have to, there’s too much at stake to do otherwise. How does one start seeing someone who for the longest time one’s eyes have been glazed over for, as a person again: as a vital, living, loving person who you just totally need, physically, spiritually, utterly to touch, in every capacity? Well, just do it, and it’ll be okay.
It is with relief that I viewed the ending, not because it felt earned, or because I wanted them to stay together, or that I thought any woman on the planet should be within two hundred metres of a sad sack as sad and sacky as Arnold. It was just a relief that it was over, and the grim circumstances of their existence could start to fade away from my consciousness. All I would need to take away from this experience was the idea that women like personal gifts at anniversaries, they like it when you buy them dinner at a fancy restaurant, they’re easier when they’re drunk, and that they really like it when you find them desirable, even when they don’t want to actually want to have sex. These are the deepest messages I took away from this strange yet comfortably mundane flick.
They never go into why Kay seems to only be able to define herself or her ‘needs’ in comparison to Arnold’s, and they never delve into why Arnold is so completely emotionally shut down. Maybe they didn’t need to, maybe they did enough, and I was asking for this to be a different kind of flick. It doesn’t pretend to be anything else, anything more, so I guess I’m being unreasonable in my expectations.
After all, this flick isn’t for me, is it? This’ll never happen to me, will it? Oh gods, strike me down now before I turn into Arnold, with a face that prompted me to scream at the screen during the “love” scene “Don’t do it, Meryl, his face is coming off at the edges!”
Hope Springs is an unintentionally ironic name for this flick, because while it might rekindle the hopes of the intended demographic – Hey Ladies! – it utterly squashed my hopes and dreams of an enjoyable night out.
6 moments in this movie which were like watching one’s own parents trying to rekindle their passion down by the fire out of 10.
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“He is everything. But I'm... I'm really lonely. And to be with someone, when you're not really with him can... it's... I think I might be less lonely... alone.” – Hope Springs
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