Mainly because some friends praised the music in it, I taped "The Bridges of Madison County" a long time ago. Having recently watched (again) the first "spaghetti western" starring Clint Eastwood ("A Fistful of Dollars") and his first repatriation starring role (in "Hang 'Em High"), I decided I was ready. In some ways the role in which he cast himself (Robin--Clint Eastwood is playing someone named "Robin"?!?) is a departure from the roles that made him famous (and, then, rich). Robin is quite talkative, for one thing. Nonetheless, there are some major continuities. For one, there is a very strong sentimental streak in the gunman from A Fistful of Dollars" who gives his accumulated cash and a takes on a lot of subsequent retaliatory torture for a woman he has done little more than glimpsed. This brings me to the recurrent masochism of the characters Eastwood has played, many in film he himself directed. Although famous for the "Make my day"/don't try my patience Dirty Harry, in his westerns from "A Fistful of Dollars" through "The Unforgiven," he gets beaten up often and severely. I would argue that in both those movies he seeks out the beatings, or at least could have avoided them fairly easily.

But I'm supposedly writing about "The Bridges of Madison County" in which he does not get beaten up by an irate husband, censorious townsmen, or by Meryl Streep. And Robin does not kill anyone or anything (not even a worm...). The only other Eastwood movie I can recall in which he does not off anyone is "White Hunter, Black Heart" in which he guns down animals instead. In "The Bridges of Madison County" he is still shooting, but a camera rather than a gun. Robin is a National Geographic staff photographer on assignment to photograph covered bridges in rural Iowa in A.D. 1965.

Lost, he stops to seek directions from Francesca Johnson (Meryl Streep), who just happens to be home alone for the next four days (husband and two children off at the state fair), vaguely unsatisfied with her life in America (she was wed by a US serviceman in eastern (I'd say very northeastern!) Italy at the end of World War II), and who just happens to be out on the porch when he drives by. Although not "love at first sight," they have a romance over the next four days that has to last both of them the twenty-something years that are the rest of their lives: the great love that could not continue ("Brief Encounter," "Indicretions of an American Wife," "All That Heaven Allows," etc.). Streep is explaining it all after her death in three notebooks and various memorabilia left to her children.

I don't do plot summaries, especially not of romances. Before getting to some of the things on screen at which I balk, let me say that Eastwood's recurrent cinematographer, Jack Green, did great work not only in making flat, rural Iowa (locales in Dallas and Madison Counties) look beautiful but in the last look through the rain (and the last look after the last look and the one after that...). Eastwood exhibits some charm and looks at Meryl Streep as if she is his last chance. Streep makes a roller-coaster of emotions visible and plausible. It's hardly news that she is a great actress inhabiting a wide range of roles, but especially good at repressed women on the verge of breaking out.

Streep is also much admired for her ability to put on a variety of accents. However, I have to say that Francesca does not sound Italian. Before I knew her character's name or background, I thought her accent hails from somewhere north and/or east of Italy. I accepted her as a European disappointed in the promised land of America, but other than trying to listen to Bellini on the radio (in rural Iowa A.D. 1965?) she never struck me as someone who grew up in Italy.

In that he is a film director, there is intrinsic plausibility in Eastwood being a photographer whom others consider a professional but not an artist. However, his set-ups (i.e., the placement of Robin's camera) don't seem right to me (only from one angle and too close to the bridges).

Insofar as the viewer can see the layout of the Johnson farm, I don't see how the alien (Washington state license plate) pickup can be hidden from view of neighbors who are curious about the photographer. No one drives by during the presumably long hours they are at bridges, and only one person stops by at the farm to keep Francesca company while her family is gone. The locals would want to know where their exotic visitor is spending his time.

And where does the family dog go? The rest of the family did not take it to the fair. We see it before and after the four-day tryst, but never while Eastwood is there. (I'm also curious about the dinner in the oven and the two plates of eggs in the sink when the neighbor comes a'callin'). And if it is so darn hot, what is with the fireplace? (Of course, I know that the answer is that it provides flickering light on the lovers.) And baking dinner? Whatever happened to summer dishes?

Having grown up in a small town only nine miles above Iowa (north, but Minnesotans think "above" in more senses than on the map) and being only two years younger than the son, I can lay claim to authority as a quasi-native in questioning not only the ease with which the visitor disappears from sight but in finding the overtness of the townspeople's shunning of a recently revealed adulteress (Michelle Benes) unbelievable. Rural upper Midwesterners are often brutally judgmental and revel in schaudenfreude (glee at the pain -- and especially the embarrassment--of others). They may gawk and say all sorts of terrible things behind a person's back, but the rudeness in face-to-face contact shown in the movie is completely outside my experience as a native and longtime resident of the cultural area.

There was a lot more adultery going on that I knew about as a particularly sexually retarded teenager, but I couldn't avoid hearing about some pairings, and I saw the "offending parties" treated with politeness in direct contact by those who slashed them in talking about them when they were not present.

Finally, if a generation is twenty years, the Eastwood-Streep pairing is not quite "intergenerational": he is 19 years older than she is (and too old for the part, as for many of his parts in the last decade). It is implausible, but not impossible, that his character predeceases her by only three years given the greater life expectancy of females beyond childbearing.

So, I guess it is obvious that I was not so swept up by the romance that I didn't notice botched continuity and concern myself with burning food and absent dogs. The movie is an interesting attempt by Eastwood to act (see my review of "Pink Cadillac") and much more successful than his foppish portrayal of John Huston in "White Hunter." The music is mellow, the photography beautiful, la Streep volcanic. A lot is wrong, but a lot is right, too.


Recommended:
Yes