David Frankel's "Hope Springs'

Kay and Arnold have been married for 31 years. They're probably in their late 50s or early 60s. They have grown children and sleep in separate bedrooms.

Arnold shuffles out of bed in the morning, eats a single egg with a slab of bacon, reads the paper and goes to work. He can't remember the last time he had sex with Kay.

Kay, on the other hand, remembers it to the day. It's been nearly five years.

This is the story not only of a particular marriage but also of the institution of marriage itself. It's not an arrangement designed for romance, as the French understand perfectly well. In India, marital sex past a certain age is regarded as unseemly. The late Gore Vidal explained the secret of his long-lasting relationship with Howard Austin— a marriage in all but name— by revealing that in decades of cohabitation they'd never slept together.

But in America, marriage is never allowed to die a natural death. Part of the problem, of course, is living with a corpse. If someone you're yoked with is dead to you, the challenge is how to keep from becoming dead to yourself.

Arnold seems to have reached this terminal point. He's turned into a zombie— still upright, still paying his bills and taxes, but only going through the motions of his life.

Arnold doesn't mind this situation and hardly seems aware of it. He knows he's on autopilot, but he assumes that's the natural order of things.

Off to see the therapist

It's Kay who wants more. Not sex necessarily— that's too far a stretch— but a little attention, a minimum amount of notice. She sees an Internet ad posted by a marriage therapist who claims that no case is too hopeless. Asserting herself for the first time in years, Kay demands that she and Arnold see the therapist. They live in Omaha. His office is in Maine.

Arnold quite reasonably objects to this request, but Kay buys two plane tickets and boards the plane alone when he refuses to accompany her. It's unclear whether Arnold, a frugal sort, is more distressed by the thought of wasting a plane ticket or losing his wife, but he shows up at the last minute.

It's an inauspicious beginning, and it gets no better when Dr. Feld, the therapist, asks for intimate details such as sexual fantasies and masturbation habits. Dr. Feld does seem to do a brisk business, though, and the Maine seaside town where he practices— turned into a marital Shangri-La by his efficient ministrations— appears to be supported mainly by the business he brings in. At any rate, Kay and Arnold are obvious ringers, and they get knowing smirks wherever they go.

Performance anxiety

Merely persuading Kay and Arnold to passively embrace is a tall order. Kay, of course, is ecstatic about this idea, but Arnold is about as enthusiastic as if he were asked to put his arms around a horse.

He isn't impotent— it's not a Viagra fix he needs— he's just lost interest, not only in Kay but also in sex itself. When pushed, he admits to a fantasy or two of his own. But it isn't enough to get him off the couch and away from the TV golf that seems to occupy most of his free time.

Arnold doesn't want to say it, and the film doesn't want to articulate it, but it's a relief to him not to have to bother with sex— all the unbuckling and fumbling and passing off of body fluids onto someone else, not to mention the pre- and post-coital rituals and, in the age of the female orgasm, performance grading as well.

He's even proud of his celibacy in a way, since it's a form of negative fidelity. Does he love his wife? Of course: He's never cheated on her.

Streep desexualized

Like director David Frankel's previous film, The Devil Wears Prada, this is very much a woman's picture, so we know how it will end: Romance is rekindled, the years fall away, and— Kay's confessed desire, and no doubt that of half the women in America— she and Arnold renew their vows on the beach with their kids looking on approvingly and Dr. Feld himself, celebrating a particularly successful outcome, dancing with a fetching young thing.

If only the Baby Boomers had known the '60s sexual revolution was going to come to this.

Hope Springs is virtually a three-character play, and could easily be staged as such; hence its dullness as cinema. Meryl Streep's long-suffering Kay has a touch of the sly-boots about her, but in a way she's as desexualized as Arnold, and as she tries to vamp him with a well-preserved but decidedly matronly body, you wish this foremost actress had stayed in character as the dominatrix of Prada, whose own sexuality has been transmuted into a steely, commercial voyeurism.

Revenge of the Puritans

Tommy Lee Jones, with his rubbery features, paunch and receding, tonsure-crowned hairline, is more successful as a couch potato than as the recovering swain; but then, as the script dissolves into women's magazine wish-fulfillment, it's hard for him to sustain credibility.

Steve Carell, of Forty-Year-Old Virgin fame, plays the fix-it Dr. Feld with an undertow of merriment, like a priest who hears nothing but lewd confessions. The film's subject matter does in fact offer the potential for great hilarity (or great tragedy, as Eugene O'Neill demonstrated with similar material). But we are after all dealing with safe middlebrow entertainment.

The message? The Puritans are still running the country. Only they could make sex seem like such a chore.