Clint Eastwood’s new movie, “The Bridges of Madison County,” is, in some ways, one of the strangest films he’s ever done. Yet it’s also one of the most deeply felt and moving. Non-violent and romantic, set in the ’60s on an isolated farm in Iowa’s heartland, the movie shows an aspect of its director/co-producer/star many in the audience may not have suspected: a gentler, more reflective and vulnerable side.
Though it’s based on the somewhat sappy if primal novel by Robert James Waller that exasperated critics while sitting on national best-seller lists for almost three years, the movie rises above the book. It also effortlessly reshapes Eastwood’s longtime screen persona, as well as co-star Meryl Streep’s.
Can we imagine Eastwood, the laconic gunslinger or cop of countless super-hits, as a quiet, affable photographer with a taste for William Butler Yeats, on assignment in August 1965, to shoot Madison County’s covered bridges for National Geographic magazine? Can we imagine the cosmopolitan Streep, acting champ of her generation, as an Iowa farm wife trapped in a cozy but banal rural life?
More important, can we envision the two of them together, as star-crossed lovers whose brief but incandescent fling (while the wife’s family is away at a state fair) triggers a love that lasts both their lifetimes?
As it turns out, we can. And it’s not because there are unsuspected depths of truth in Waller’s corny but wildly popular story of Robert Kincaid and Francesca Johnson’s brief interlude. Streep and Eastwood, with plangent sincerity, work both with and against the grain of the tale. They make sense of its sentimentalism.
Communing over grated carrots, laughing over trifles, staring passionately at each other in a kitchen humming with the sounds of twilight, the two co-stars manage to make maturity sexy and sudden-but-undying love plausible. (They have plenty of help from Francesca’s radio, which is conveniently tuned to a station dominated by Dinah Washington and Johnny Hartman jazz ballads.)
With these strong and sensitive performances at the center, Eastwood’s “Bridges” becomes essentially a muted, two-character chamber piece, its action set both now and 30 years ago. Novelist Waller framed his story with what were supposed to be the recollections of Francesca’s grown-up children.
But the movie begins, more harshly and simply, as Francesca’s will is being read and her children–uptight Michael (Victor Slezak) and embittered Carolyn (Annie Corley)–discover her secret journal among her effects. As they read it, amazed, “Bridges” shifts back and forth between the summery past, seemingly full of rich promise, and the autumnal present, heavy with the second generation’s shock and disorientation.
When we watch the slow mating game between Kincaid and Francesca, we do it at least partially through the eyes of Michael and Carolyn, two people in failed or troubled marriages. And as we watch the lovers of 1965–who meet when Kincaid, lost, asks Francesca the way to Roseman Bridge–we do it in full knowledge of two things. Their affair, somehow, ended. And it overwhelmed and obsessed Francesca for the rest of her life.
Compared with the book, the movie is more lucid and touching. By staying simple, it goes beyond the book’s limitations, such as the sense that Waller, in creating his alter-ego Kincaid, was cooking up an idealized version of himself as a “last cowboy” composed of parts of Willie Nelson, Henry Fonda, Yeats and maybe even Eastwood. And it minimizes or alters the original dialogue: those heavily cosmic, over-reaching speeches that sound less like two people in love than two people breathlessly reciting greeting-card verses to each other.
When there’s a line in this movie that really clangs, it’s usually something of Waller’s. You may wince when Eastwood says: “This kind of certainty comes only once.” But you’d wince even more if screenwriter Richard LaGravanese hadn’t whittled it down from Waller’s “In a universe of ambiguity, this kind of certainty comes only once, and never again, no matter how many lifetimes you live.” Could any performer but the late Rod Serling, with a full chorus behind him, pull off a speech like that?
LaGravanese also wrote Terry Gilliam’s darkly funny redemption saga “The Fisher King” and the caustic holiday comedy “The Ref.” He may seem an odd choice for “Bridges.” But, as LaGravanese also shows in his script for the new “A Little Princess,” he has a romantic spirit to go with his trenchant wit.
And director Eastwood responds. Waller’s story is a cute, archetypal heart-wrencher. But Eastwood’s style, as both filmmaker and actor, is tough and true. Neither he nor Streep ever obviously go for the big tears, the programmed heart-wrenchers. The scenes where Waller sets up his heartbreak anvil choruses are the ones they play most carefully, subtly. (Strangely, Eastwood doesn’t use the one part of the novel that seems ideal for him: the episode with Kincaid’s jazz saxman buddy. And it’s obvious why: That scene can’t be worked into LaGravanese’s tight flashback structure.)
“Bridges” is not a major Eastwood directorial project, like “Unforgiven,” “The Outlaw Josey Wales” or “Bird.” It’s not even a film he intended to direct. Instead, it’s a rescue job star Eastwood took on after several other directors–including Sydney Pollack, Bruce Beresford and Steven Spielberg–bailed out.
Yet even though director Eastwood took on “Bridges” at the last minute, he plays the material with a master’s light but confident touch. Like jazz pianist Bill Evans–who applied a lean, dry, almost mathematical technique to romantic ballads (like “My Funny Valentine”) that had been all but schmaltzed to death by legions of cocktail pianists–Eastwood makes “Bridges” sing by keeping it cool, draining it of kitsch.
Part of the book’s appeal may lie in its suggestion that there’s a whole world of art and passion available to simple, trapped people in small towns. Perhaps that’s one reason the novel “The Bridges of Madison County” became such a huge hit. It suggested that people who read books were deeper, felt more–that they were going to experience great romances.
Every generation seems to find a new innocence in the generations that preceded it. But the people who see the film “Bridges” will find something different and special: a great double-star vehicle, a romance of equals. Eastwood and Streep–working in unique harmony–powerfully create the illusion of impossible love. And as they do, with unique grace and skill, they remind us how precious even a corny love song can be. And how rarely we hear them played with true sensitivity, emotion and beauty.
”THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY”
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Directed by Clint Eastwood; written by Richard LaGravanese, based on the novel by Robert James Waller; photographed by Jack N. Green; edited by Joel Cox; production designed by Jeannine Oppewall; music by Lennie Niehaus; produced by Kathleen Kennedy, Eastwood. A Warner Brothers release; opens Friday at The Esquire, Biograph, Lincoln Village and outlying theaters. Running time: 2:15. MPAA rating: PG-13.
THE CAST
Robert Kincaid ………… Clint Eastwood
Francesca Johnson ……….. Meryl Streep
Carolyn Johnson …………..Annie Corley
Michael Johnson ………….Victor Slezak
Richard Johnson …………… Jim Haynie
