So, if I am on-record of being a big fan of Clint Eastwood’s work when he’s directing a movie, I think it is only fair that I make an effort to see the sorts of movies he made that, well, I normally wouldn’t go out of my way to see. I think if anyone else had made The Bridges of Madison County, I think it is safe to say I would probably have skipped it outright. Despite being based on a best-selling novel, I don’t believe it’s on my Fill-In Filmography, which means the only motivation I have to see it is Eastwood behind the camera and the incomparable Meryl Streep in front of it.
That said, I have no plans of filling in my Eastwood gaps with any movie where he teamed with an orangutan any time soon.
Not long after the death of Italian-born Iowa farmwife Francesca Johnson (Streep), her adult children are shocked to learn that not she not want to be buried in the plot next to her late husband Richard (Jim Haynie). Instead, she wants to be cremated and her ashes scattered around a nearby covered bridge. Neither her son nor her daughter can believe it, but a little investigation into a safe deposit box she had at the local bank and a hidden trunk reveals that Francesca had a secret life of some sort. During a long weekend alone when her family were away at a the state fair, Francesca met one Robert Kincaid (Eastwood), a photographer for National Geographic magazine.
The two hit it off, first as friends and later as more. Kincaid is the sort of exciting man that Francesca has never really known before, a fellow who blows in and out of places all around the world, taking photos and just seeing what’s out there. He’s nothing like her husband, a man who is never really portrayed as anything other than a bit dull. But at the same time, can she just pack up and leave her family? Given the framing device of her son and daughter reading the letter she left behind telling them what happened, that seems unlikely, but what does it mean if she stays with Richard and the kids while he moves on to something else? And what does that mean for a man like Kincaid for that matter?
Now, again, this isn’t normally my genre, but for the most part, this worked. OK, there is a moment when Kincaid is eating at a local diner and a lot of the locals are giving him funny looks, something I might chalk up to the fact he’s a stranger, but given the flashback is set in 1965, any character played by Eastwood seems like an unlikely person to be mistaken for some kind of hippie. What the movie is instead is a look at two middle-aged or older people finding a burst of romance in their otherwise ordinary lives. Yeah, Kincaid may be a world traveler, but he hasn’t had a relationship like this before. The decision both have to stay or go isn’t one either of them take likely, and the relationship clearly affects both characters far more deeply than either of them could have imagined.
However, it is to the movie’s credit that neither of them actually turned out miserable as a result. As the movie is told largely from Francesca’s point of view, and despite her temptations, the character never lets the heartache make her miserable but instead uses it to be a more sociable person. It’s a credit to the performances of both Eastwood and especially Streep, to say nothing of Eastwood’s usual slow, steady directorial style, that this movie works as well as it does. I don’t know much about the book this movie is based on, but I don’t think it gets the kind of buzz today that it did then. But as for the movie, I wouldn’t have pegged Eastwood as much of a guy to direct or star in a romance of any kind, and yet, he managed to make a great one.
Grade: A-
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