Surprisingly perceptive look at a married couple, together for 31 years, whose sex life has become nonexistent: he's harboring grudges that are keeping him from showing intimacy, she wants to be loved as a woman again. They travel to Maine for a week-long extensive therapy session with a marriage counselor, who attempts to break down the "scar tissue" that has built up between the two and get them to stop arguing and start touching. The fact that there are no easy answers presented in Vanessa Taylor's screenplay makes this one of the least-facile commercial movies about marriage in a long while. Leads Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones are terrifically successful in bringing out the sensitivity in the material, though establishing the characters' ages wouldn't have hurt (both stars, in their 60s, appear to be playing a man and woman in their 50s who act like people in their 70s). While this premise isn't exactly full of lively or visually exciting action, the relationship between Streep and Jones becomes real and bracing to us, with Steve Carell very fine as their therapist. The over-emphatic score (jazzy, romantic and plaintive, and capped with heavy-handed pop choices) keeps rising up to underline the emotions in scenes that do not need music to heighten the emotions involved, yet the acting and Taylor's sharp writing carry the load here--and with a great deal of lightly funny dignity. **1/2 from ****