Filmmaker David Frankel has an ear for what women say — to each other, to their men and to themselves, though the last is not necessarily made audible to others.
That's certainly the case with Kay (Meryl Streep) in "Hope Springs": A woman in her 60s with two grown-up children, Kay is clearly unused to giving vent to her emotions and has probably been brought up to think that inhibitions are good things. In one scene, she asks her colleague in an offhand way, "Do you think married people can change?" And that's the only clue the people around her get that she's unhappy in her marriage.
Instead, Kay's heartache is voiced through the small spaces of silence in her conversations with husband Arnold (Tommy Lee Jones) and the twinges of pain she lets surface on an otherwise placid countenance.
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