Clint Eastwood (1995)
Robert James Waller’s 1992 romantic novel The Bridges of Madison County, a huge bestseller, was despised by many readers, including Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep. Eastwood eventually agreed to direct and star in the screen version on condition that Streep was in it too. ‘She said she had a problem with the book,’ Eastwood told David Gritten in a 1995 interview in the Daily Telegraph, ‘and I said well, join the club, but look at the script and see what you think’. With Richard LaGravenese (who gets sole screenplay credit), Eastwood had reworked the structure and focus of Waller’s novel. Its story of the four-day, mutually life-changing affair between a National Geographic photographer and a Midwest farmer’s wife was now ‘told from the woman’s point of view’ instead of the man’s. Streep signed up. The result was a critical success, as well as a commercial one.
The time is 1965 and the place Iowa, where Francesca Johnson (Streep), who came to America as an Italian war bride, keeps house for her husband Richard (Jim Haynie) and their teenage children (Christopher Kroon and Sarah Kathryn Schmitt). Richard is solid and affectionate though, like the kids, he takes Francesca for granted. She’s left on her own for a few days when the other three make a trip to neighbouring Illinois for the state fair. Soon after their departure, a jeep pulls up outside the farmhouse. Robert Kincaid (Eastwood), in Iowa on an assignment to photograph the covered bridges of Madison County, has lost his way and asks directions. This is the starting point of a relationship that develops so quickly and strongly that, by the eve of her family’s return, Francesca is planning to abandon the homestead and run away with Robert to travel the world with him. In the event, she can’t bring herself to do so and Robert leaves alone.
The Johnsons’ family life resumes with Francesca’s husband, son and daughter none the wiser about her brief encounter. Until, that is, her death, some twenty-five years later. Her now middle-aged son Michael (Victor Slezak) and daughter Carolyn (Annie Corley) are baffled to find that their mother left instructions in her will to be cremated, rather than buried alongside her late husband, and for her ashes to be thrown from the covered Roseman Bridge in Winterset. In a safe deposit box, Michael and Carolyn discover photos Robert Kincaid took of Francesca, letters he wrote to her, and journals, in which she recorded in detail the events of their four days together.
The Bridges of Madison County is essentially a two-hander and it’s a pity it’s not actually a two-hander. With a couple of exceptions – Francesca’s husband and Lucy Redfield (Michelle Benes), a local woman ostracised by the community for having an affair with a married man – the minor roles aren’t well written or played. A framing device for the main narrative may have been necessary but the scenes that involve Michael and Carolyn, describe their shifting reactions to what they discover about their mother and cause them to reappraise their own less than satisfactory marriages, are heavy-handed and banal. They’re also the main reason why the film (at 134 minutes) is overlong.
If the source material is as bad as the Telegraph article and comments on Wikipedia suggest, the able Richard LaGravenese (The Fisher King, Behind the Candelabra and plenty more) wasn’t faced with an easy task in smartening it up. But Clint Eastwood would have done better to cut most of the Michael-Carolyn stuff and give Francesca more farm work to do while she’s on her own, especially since she’s one of Meryl Streep’s most physicalised creations. As it is, the heroine appears not only to have time on her hands but to forget, after its appearance early on, there’s still a family dog – a golden retriever – to feed. When Francesca’s husband returns home and they do a household shop together, it’s a relief to see this includes a big bag of Purina dog chow. The retriever must be starving.
The film opens with some good scene-setting shots of landscape, foretelling what will be a strength throughout: the director and his DP Jack N Green build up, in an unstressed way, a strong sense of place (aptly given the National Geographic connection). But the early, pre-flashback scenes in the farmhouse are, even by the standards of a Clint Eastwood movie, clumsy and overacted – as Carolyn, Michael and his wife Betty (Phyllis Lyons) respond to Francesca’s surprising post-mortem wishes. Once Streep and Eastwood are on screen together, however, The Bridges of Madison County turns into something more singular than the clichéd scenario leads one to expect.
The two leads are certainly an odd couple – he with his minimal acting, she with her maximal. Eastwood had recently directed the quite well-received A Perfect World (1993) and, before that, Unforgiven (1992), still his biggest succès d’estime. Streep had been through what was, for her, a lean patch. The interval between her Academy Award nomination for The Bridges of Madison County and the previous one, for Postcards from the Edge (1990), is the longest in an Oscar nods CV that runs from The Deer Hunter (1978) to The Post (2017). She clearly decided that playing an Italian woman was a chance to go to town on the arm and hand movements, which are very elaborate. Otherwise, she cuts a physically credible, interestingly sturdy figure; there’s a sense of vitality subdued in her plain yet somehow assertive walk. While some of Francesca’s laughter as she listens to Robert’s funny stories of his globetrotting career is a bit overdone, Streep is vocally inventive and convincing.
Francesca is conspicuously agitated very soon after Robert’s arrival. There’s arguably a rationale for this: she’s bored enough with her life to be instantly sensitised to the charms of a new man in it. On the other hand, this could simply be Streepian embellishment. As a director, Eastwood, like others before and since, seems so in awe of Streep’s technique that he lets her do what she wants, which is sometimes too much. As an actor, though, he seems inspired by sharing the screen with such a lavishly gifted player. How else to explain his uncharacteristically animated and appealing performance? Robert Kincaid – a slightly opaque loner, a world traveller yet a man from nowhere – aligns with the tradition of Eastwood’s Western strangers-in-town. But he brings to this role an unaccustomed emotional alertness too.
Since there’s no danger of either star being upstaged, it was unkind of Eastwood to cast some of the supporting roles in the way he did – as if to vindicate at every opportunity Francesca’s disenchantment with Iowa and its natives. This isn’t such a problem with her neighbour Madge (Debra Monk), a plump and oblivious chatterbox, who’s in only one short scene. But the appearance of the forty-something version of Francesca’s son, a more prominent figure in the story, is borderline cruel. Victor Slezak is the embodiment of the pompous windbag Michael evidently is – living proof that a new generation of Iowans is as narrow-minded as the one that oppressed his mother. That comes through in bit parts too. When the scandalous Lucy (Michelle Benes is a distinctively delicate presence) goes into a Winterset diner, the waitresses’ hostility towards her is crudely overdone. An older woman, who sits a couple of seats away from Lucy and stars at her curiously and silently, is more believably offensive.
The exchanges between Francesca and Robert become less engaging as the script ratchets up her conflicted angst. The de luxe love scenes get to be a drag. I’d seen The Bridges of Madison County once before, probably around twenty years ago, but didn’t remember it in much detail. It’s acquired the reputation of a classic weepie but, as it entered the home straight, I was wondering if the waterworks weren’t all on screen. Meryl Streep does a good deal of crying. Even Clint Eastwood sheds a tear. The last time the lovers see each other, in a store car park, it’s pouring down. Lachrymal rain courses down the windows of the Johnsons’ car. Eventually, though, the movie lived up to expectations. The woman to my immediate left was discreetly but persistently fiddling with a tissue. The sounds of nose-blowing and a male coughing were everywhere to be heard in the BFI Studio.
The scenes I found affecting weren’t the climactic heartbreak ones or the last sequence, when Michael and Carolyn, not only reconciled to their mother’s wishes but wiser and stronger people after reading her journals, scatter her ashes as requested. The emotionally potent sequences are those featuring the older Francesca – caring for her dying husband, later receiving delivery of a box of Robert’s cameras and other memorabilia, along with news of his death. Jim Haynie has a fine moment when Richard, on his deathbed, tells Francesca how much he loves her and says sorry for being unable to give her the life she dreamed of. But the power of these scenes is down chiefly to Meryl Streep, and further evidence that part of her genius is the imagination she brings to playing women in old age.
Her breakout stage role in 1974 now seems to predict this particular talent. At the age of twenty-five, she played the octogenarian ‘translatrix’ Constance Garnett, in a Yale School of Drama production of The Idiots Karamazov by Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato. In The Iron Lady (2011), her interpretation of the elderly Margaret Thatcher, her failing mental powers intruding on her obdurate personality, remains one of Streep’s greatest achievements. What she does as the seventyish Francesca Johnson is much smaller scale but, with the help of Roy Helland’s skilful make-up, highly persuasive. The gestures that earlier in the film sometimes looked artificial are now attenuated and fully absorbed into the movements of the woman Streep foresees Francesca becoming. The emotions she expresses as she looks through Robert’s bequest are eloquent and true. Meryl Streep had her seventieth birthday in June this year. She’s approaching an age where she no longer needs to imagine what it’s like being old. That makes you appreciate her geriatric portraits of yesteryear all the more.
1 September 2019
