Hope Floats

Reviewer: Alyice Edrich

Movie

Plot

A young woman discovers her marriage is over on national television. She returns to her hometown to heal and finds herself dealing with the scrutiny of her old classmates, mending her relationship with her mother and daughter, and finding love.

Starring

Sandra Bullock, Harry Connick Jr., Gena Rowlands, Mae Whitman, and Michael Paré.

The Review

I just finished watching Hope Floats for the twentieth time! It’s a beautiful story about real life. Hope Floats is about a woman named Birdee who lost herself trying to be everything her husband wanted. In the end, he left her for another woman—her best friend. She returns home—to her mother and the small town she grew up in—to rediscover and find herself.

There are many good parts in the film, but the one that stood out the most was the conversation Birdee had with her date, Justin. Justin was an architect who left his small town to build a BIG career—the American Dream. But what he discovered was that it didn’t make him happy.

On their date, Justin takes Birdee to see the house he’s building. When Birdee asks him why he paints houses for a living when he can build beautiful things, he says, “You’re talking about the American Dream. You find something you love then you twist it. You torture it; trying to find a way to make money at it. You spend a lifetime doing that. And at the end, you can’t find a trace of what you started out loving…That’s why I came back here, so I can live the way I wanted.”

“So I can LIVE the way I wanted,” what a statement!

How many of us can say we are living the way we wanted? How many of us can say we are doing what we started out loving? How many of us can honestly say: “After a lifetime of searching, I found something I truly love, something I’m good at, something that makes me happy, and something that I don’t regret waking up every morning to do.”

Justin paints houses for a living. It’s not glamorous, but it pays the bills. In the eyes of his small town socialites, he’s considered a failure. But he doesn’t care how they see him because he’s confident in who he is as a man. He is doing what makes him happy and at the end of the day, isn’t that all that really matters?

As Birdee soon discovered, we can make ourselves miserable trying to live up to someone else’s standards. Birdee lost herself trying to be something she wasn’t. She wanted so desperately to hold onto something that was never really hers to begin with that she lost sight of what truly mattered to her—her happiness.

When her world came crumbling down around her, she found strength she forgot she had. By the end of the film, she rediscovered her passion of becoming a photographer, rebuilt her relationship with her daughter, grew to understand and appreciate her mother, rekindled her relationship with her father (despite his Alzheimer’s disease), and found true love.

Whether we want to be the stay-at-home mom who attends every one of her child’s school functions, or the father who comes home happy every evening because he works a job he loves, we owe it to ourselves to find that place in life where we can say, “I’m living the way I want.”

Order Hope Floats today!