Aasof’s Reflections

My wife really wanted to see the film ‘Hope Springs‘. I was somewhat reticent, it being yet another ‘chick-flick‘ but I have usually enjoyed the film performances of both Tommy Lee Jones and Meryl Streep . We haven’t seen all of their films, in fact very few of the many films that they have starred in, with Hope Springs being their first ‘joint venture’ (unless you know different). We don’t always enjoy the same films. My wife really liked the film It’s Complicated and insisted on buying the DVD. I simply thought that the film traded on the name of Meryl Streep and her co-star Alex Baldwin.

Then I enjoyed watching Out of Africa  a lot more than my wife, perhaps not really a chick flick but it was a romantic love story.  May be it was because Meryl Streep, playing the role of the ’emancipated woman’ Karen Blixen, was in thrall to her lover Denys Finch Hatton played by Robert Redford.

I especially liked Meryl Streep in the film The Devil Wears Prada, which really was a chick-flick and my choice of film. Hm! No I don’t wear Prada ‘stuff’, but the following clip suggests that you and I may unwittingly do so. Incidentally, my wife bought me the DVD (and there’s no connection here with Hope Springs).

This year we celebrated (ahem) fifty-two years of marriage. The relationship crisis in Hope Springs was occurring after thirty-one years, so we are viewing the film in retrospect. My wife was surprised that I enjoyed the film so much, but perhaps not as surprised as I was. I thought the film dealt with real issues sensitively and amusingly, without reducing them to farce. It was the reticence of Tommy Lee Jones as the husband that eventually broke the stoicism of his wife, played by Meryl Streep. He didn’t realise that marriage simply begins and ends with the quest for an answer to a question:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;

Man never is, but always to be blessed:

The soul, uneasy and confined from home,

Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

– Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man