Tommy Lee Jones of “Lincoln” and Anne Hathaway of “Les Miserables” claimed the first prizes of the night Sunday at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, winning supporting-acting honors that boost their prospects for the Academy Awards.
On an overseas flight we took recently, we were delighted to catch Meryl Streep’s starrer, “Hope Springs,” in which she plays the wife of Tommy Lee Jones. His character is happy enough in their 30-year union, but she feels that the joy and passion have been leached out of it, and she wants to save it with the help of a marriage counselor (Steve Carell).
We have always enjoyed Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones’ performances—but, casting them together as Kay and Arnold Soames, an unhappy married couple, in David Frankel’s adult rom-com, “Hope Springs,” initially seems uninspired because, despite their similarly impressive Ivy League roots (he’s from Harvard; she went to Yale), the Oscar-winning couple’s oeuvres and acting styles are simply too disparate.
We recall having had a really rollicking time watching the first “Men in Black” sci-fi comedy flick. It ranked up there with “Back to the Future 1” in terms of puckish inventiveness and plain rip-roaring fun.
