Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep to Fall in Love (and Hopefully Restart De Niro’s Career) in ‘The…

By  · Published on August 6th, 2013

Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep to Fall in Love (and Hopefully Restart De Niro’s Career) in ‘The Good House’

Robert De Niro began repairing years of poor career choices with Silver Linings Playbook last year, and it looks like he might try and continue this trend with The Good House (for sanity’s sake, let’s just sweep The Big Wedding under a rug and never speak of it again). Also starring Meryl Streep, The Good House is an adaptation of Ann Leary’s similarly-titled novel, and it will be written for the screen by Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Hours,” which became another film starring Streep a few years back. There’s no word yet on who’ll direct.

The combination of Cunningham with Streep and De Niro (who previously worked together on The Deer Hunter) sounds like a match made in heaven. The book’s subject matter, however, paints an entirely different picture. The novel tells the story of Hildy Good (Streep), a realtor and recovering alcoholic whose perfect routine is thrown into disarray by the arrival of a new friend (who hasn’t been cast yet) and an old flame (De Niro).

The story is described as a dark comedy, but the synopsis bears an unpleasant resemblance to sugary-sweet romantic comedies that have been dotting Streep’s filmography in recent years – Hope Springs, It’s Complicated, and the like. Hopefully, The Good House will end up a dark comedy with some bite to it, rather than something you watch solely because it’s on TV and the remote’s too far out of reach.