This new offering from David Frankel is not the director’s choice.  It turned out that the study of problems besetting intimacy in middle age, with its many scenes in a therapist’s chair (or sofa, in this case) was a project spear-headed by Meryl Streep.  ‘I didn’t even read the script before I accepted’, Frankel admitted.  It was the actress who tempted him and not the story.

Which may explain why there were some things about the structure of the film which were a bit unsatisfactory.  Without giving too much away: the Act Three reversal (the bit where they suddenly come up against unseen trouble just before the end) was badly managed and clunky, and it was never quite clear why the husband in the film decided to stay in the deal, long after he had been alienated by the methods of the shrink and even when he had been offered half his money back (surely a point at which most red blooded males would have cut and run.)

This was a five star film simply in terms of the tenderness portrayed.

Perhaps the director of such frothy fare as THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA and MARLEY AND ME felt a little out of his depth with the delicate subject matter, and didn’t intervene with the editor’s knife quite as keenly as he might have done. Mild under-development issues aside, however, the potentially schmaltzy subject matter was handled in a gentlemanly and intelligent fashion, not likely to leave an audience cringing in its seat.  This was a five star film simply in terms of the tenderness portrayed.  And there were some great lines, too: particularly from the man, a healthy cynic who thought that therapists were worse than lawyers for extracting your money and breaking you apart.

‘To touch someone you love, can be the hardest thing of all’ said Frankel.

Apparently other critics have been unsure about the score, which was mood based, rather than suggesting a specific cultural frame of reference.  Problems start if you take the whole thing too literally, and consider the couple as representative of the Age of Pop, for example – the Baby Boomer generation certainly does not ring true as a gang who are suffering from sexual repression. Keeping the whole thing in a timeless and neutral space (musically at least) revealed these characters as quite anonymous Everymen who were failing to connect in the way they longed to, and that was where the power of the film really lay. ‘To touch someone you love, can be the hardest thing of all’ said Frankel.

And there, in a nutshell, was the central paradox of the film: that where most we despair, we hope in equal measure… and sometimes, if we’re lucky, hope wins.