<P> Hope Floats is a 1998 American romance comedy - drama film directed by Forest Whitaker and starring Sandra Bullock, Harry Connick Jr., and Gena Rowlands . </P> <P> Birdee (Bullock) is an unassuming housewife whose life is disrupted when her husband (Michael Paré) reveals his infidelity to her on a Ricki Lake - style talk show . She and her young daughter Bernice go back home to her mother (Rowlands) and the small town in which she grew up in, where everyone knows of her televised marital collapse . Meanwhile, an old friend of hers, 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 . </P> <P> 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 only daughter Bernice (Mae Whitman) move back to Birdee's hometown of Smithville, Texas, with Birdee's eccentric mother Ramona (Gena Rowlands) and her 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 . </P> <P> 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 desperately wants to be with her father and grudgingly blames her mother for the breakup, even trying to sabotage the romantic overtures Justin makes towards Birdee . Meanwhile, Bernice is not very happy that she left Chicago and is having difficulty adjusting to her new life and school in Smithville . Her negative view of the small town is worsened when she is bullied by a classmate known as Big Dolores . </P>

In hope floats who is the little boy