There's Always Hope: A Marriage Tale That Isn't Worth Saving
By Jim Slotek
Rating: C
Like a bumblebee’s flight, the marriage-in-peril film There’s Always Hope seems ungainly and unlikely, involving as it does a decades-long union that dissolves with virtually zero drama or emotion.
In fact, the movie is so innocuous, it plays like a movie you might see playing in the background of another movie.
Written and directed by Tim Lewiston, whose last listed feature, The Hot Potato, was more than a decade ago, There’s Always Hope reunites him with that film’s Colm Meaney (who, for the record, has a lot more in him than Chief O’Brien in incarnations of Star Trek. See him in Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake or Stephen Frears’ The Van and The Snapper).
Those skills are barely visible here. Meaney plays Jonathan, a successful and famous writer of pot-boiler “airport novels” (think Jack Reacher), whose desire to write something “important” has frozen his creativity and apparently alienated him from his wife Samantha (Kate Ashfield).
As the movie opens, his daughter Hope (Hannah Chinn) is picking up the pieces of her parents’ recent split-up. Her mother, who has doubled as Jonathan’s book agent all these years, has taken up with her obnoxious business partner Luke (John Light). Her sister Amelia (Brenda Meaney, Colm’s daughter) has a never-explained, deep-seated beef with her dad and automatically assumes he’s at fault.
As for Jonathan, he has left their country home in Stratford to brood and drink wine at their villa in Portugal, being fussed over by the housekeeper Gabriela (Cristina Cavalinhos). Hey, I said he was successful!
So, next stop for Hope is Portugal. She clearly has a pathological urge to “fix” everything and everyone around her. This, like her sister’s anger, is never properly explained. Nonetheless, this is the story of how a determined, somewhat foul-mouthed young woman, brings everybody together, even if it has to be against their will.
There are so few moving pieces in this ostensible drama that it must be beefed up with a sun-drenched romance with a local Portuguese med student named Rodrigo (Francisco Fernandez), and a recent split-up with a longtime boyfriend (who we never meet) who keeps calling and texting.
Technically, Hope is the movie’s protagonist, given that she is the only proactive character, demanding and insisting that all antagonists face each other at the villa and drink wine.
Indeed, wine is such a cure-all in There’s Always Hope, you wonder why marriage counsellors and psychiatrists even exist.
In most every case, emotional traumas and grievances decades in the making fall prey to a nice merlot and, y’know, just the right amount of talking. In one case, we witness a reconciliation in the distance, angry shouting replaced by giddy laughter before the bottle’s even empty.
The scenery is amazing, obviously, so you have something to look at even if there’s very little story to speak of, no crisis point, no emotional catharsis. And all that wine-drinking should put you in a fine mood for some glass-swirling when you get home.
There’s Always Hope. Written and directed by Tim Lewiston. Starring Colm Meaney, Hannah Chinn and Kate Ashfield. Opens in theatres Friday, March 3.