My Favorite 'Love Story' Movies: #10

Hope Floats - Starring:  Sandra Bullock & Harry Connick Jr.

IMDB Link: Hope Floats

8Track Love Movie Playlist

My favorite song from the movie:  Make You Feel My Love by Garth Brooks

Why I love the movie:  The spirit has an indescribable strength at its very core that almost always allows us to hope for a better tomorrow.  Birdie has not only been betrayed by her husband but also her best friend and on national television to make matters worse.  Forced to face truths she had no inkling of and to become a single mother that moves back home, she proves the cliche is true - That which does not kills us makes us stronger. 

Sandra, as Berdie, makes us feel like she's one of us.  The girl next door, the mother and wife doing her best - nothing special, just an ordinary woman who is heartbroken by circumstances many women can relate to.  That's the beautiful thing about Hope Floats - from beginning to end, it's our lives there on the screen.  It's our story or a version of it.  It seems like we lose small pieces of ourselves along the way until we don't recognize who we've become in comparison to who we once were. 

The female relationships in this movie are told with such honesty and simplicity.  Gena Rowlands as Berdie's opinionated and tough mother.  Berdie's relationship with her young daughter, Bernice, as the child tries to understand the end of her parent's marriage and abandonment by her father.

Through scene after scene, you root for Berdie and Bernice to make a better life.  You watch Harry Connick Jr. as Justin Matisse and think that is the sexiest name ever for a romantic hero that says to Berdie, "Dancing's just a conversation between two people. Talk to me."

My favorite quote from the movie:   "Childhood is what you spend the rest of your life trying to overcome. That's what momma always says. She says that beginnings are scary, endings are usually sad, but it's the middle that counts the most. Try to remember that when you find yourself at a new beginning. Just give hope a chance to float up. And it will, too.."