Sex and Sixty

Last week, Muri and I saw the new film, Hope Springs, starring Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones.  In the film, Kay (Streep) and Arnold (Jones) Soames are husband and wife in a marriage that seems to have run its course but continues on inertia.   We are never told the ages of Kay and Arnold, so I’m using the ages of the actors in my title … Streep is 61, Jones is 65.  Their conversation is limited to perfunctory table talk and their affection to rote good-bye kisses as Arnold heads off to work.   They not only sleep in separate beds but separate rooms.  Arnold is a particularly cranky curmudgeon whose home life seems to consist of watching golf on TV, managing every detail of Kay’s life and avoiding any hint of intimacy.   Kay is what we used to call a shrinking violet, giving in with little resistance to her life sentence as cook and housewife.  We’d never know that she longs for more if she didn’t confide in her friend at Coldwater Creek where she works part time.   Oh, yeah … they haven’t had sex in five years.  When she receives a brochure about a renowned marriage therapist, Dr. Bernie Feld (Steve Carrell) in Hope Springs, Maine, she coerces Arnold into going for a week of intensive couples therapy.