Hope Floats

Hope Floats
Theatrical film poster
Directed by	Forest Whitaker
Produced by	Lynda Obst Sandra Bullock Elizabeth Joan Hooper Mary McLaglen Reba Merrill
Written by	Steven Rogers
Starring	Sandra Bullock Harry Connick Jr. Gena Rowlands Mae Whitman
Music by	Dave Grusin
Cinematography	Caleb Deschanel
Edited by	Richard Crew
Production company	Fortis Films
Distributed by	20th Century Fox
Release date	May 29, 1998
Running time	115 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$30 million
Box office	$81,471,882

Hope Floats is a 1998 American romantic drama film directed by Forest Whitaker and starring Sandra Bullock, Harry Connick, Jr., and Gena Rowlands.

Birdee (Bullock) is an unassuming housewife whose life is disrupted when her husband (Michael Pare) reveals his infidelity to her on a Ricki Lake-style talk show. She goes home to her mother (Rowlands) and the small town in which she grew up, where everyone knows of her televised marital collapse. Meanwhile, an old friend, Justin (Connick, Jr.), has entered her life, sparking a romance. While Justin's intentions are clear and good, Birdee struggles with the decision to let him fully into her life.

Birdee Pruitt (Sandra Bullock) is a Chicago housewife who is invited onto the Toni Post talk show under the pretense of getting a free makeover but instead is ambushed with the revelation that her husband Bill has been having an affair with her best friend Connie (Rosanna Arquette). Humiliated on national television, Birdee and her precocious daughter Bernice (Mae Whitman) move back to Birdee's hometown of Smithville, Texas, with Birdee's eccentric mother Ramona (Gena Rowlands) and young, imaginative nephew Travis (Cameron Finley), to make a fresh start. As Birdee and Bernice leave Chicago, Birdee gives Bernice a letter from her father, telling Bernice how much he misses her.

Birdee struggles to make a new life as a working single mother and deals with the growing attraction between herself and a former high school classmate, Justin Matisse (Harry Connick, Jr.), who Ramona hopes that Birdee will get together with. She also tries to rebuild her relationship with her estranged mother, her ailing father (who suffers from Alzheimer's Disease), and her daughter, who wants desperately to be with her father and blames her mother for the breakup, even trying to sabotage the romantic overtures Justin makes towards Birdee. Meanwhile, Bernice is not happy that she left Chicago and is having a hard time adjusting to life in Smithville. Her negative view of the small town is worsened when she is bullied by a classmate known as Big Dolores.