...an old-fashioned love story for adults.
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Wait. Let me get it straight: This is a Clint Eastwood film, right? He directed it, co-produced it, and stars in it. Yet he never shoots anybody nor so much as punches anybody out? Yeah, that's right. "The Bridges of Madison County" from 1995 is an old-fashioned love story for adults, an updated "Brief Encounter" if you will, and as such it's probably the gentlest film Eastwood has ever made. And it's probably the sweetest film he's made, too, and I mean that in the very best sense.
The screenplay, adapted from Robert James Waller's best-selling novel, begins in the present (1995) with the death of the main character, Francesca Johnson (Meryl Streep), a Midwestern housewife, and flashes back to a few momentous days in her life thirty years before.
Francesca was to her two children, Michael (Victor Slezak) and Carolyn (Annie Corley), the ideal mother. She appeared to have a model marriage to husband Richard (Jim Haynie), an Iowa farmer who married her when he was in the army stationed in Italy. Now that their mother has died, the children discover some secrets in her past, revealed in a series of journals the mother kept hidden for many years. The story unfolds as the children, grown into their forties, read the mother's notebooks. She wanted them to know who she really was.
It seems that Francesca was not quite the proper and contented lady the children always saw. As Francesca herself says, Iowa was not what she "dreamed of as a girl." The fact is, Francesca, a former schoolteacher whose husband demanded she quit teaching when they married, longs for more than a lonely country life in the middle of the farm belt. And we can see why. The husband and two kids in flashback are good, solid, upstanding, dull, empty, unimaginative people, and Francesca is understandably unfulfilled.
Then, one day when the husband and kids are away at a State Fair for four days, leaving her alone, who should drop by the farmhouse but a "National Geographic" photographer--the single, free-spirited, sensitive, and handsome Robert Kincaid (Eastwood)--who's on assignment to shoot some of the county's historic covered bridges. He's lost and stops by Francesca's house looking for directions. That's the setup, and a rather lengthy one it is. Yet it's worth it.
The relationship begins innocently enough, neither person intending for anything to happen. Still, chemistry does happen, and life for all of us does little to interfere with it. Like the metaphorical "bridges" of the title, each of the characters creates a new passage, develops in new ways, finds a new life. Moreover, Eastwood as director films the characters' four-day affair with discretion and restraint, concentrating on the psychological changes in the characters rather than on the purely physical. With the exception of his inclusion of a single hard profanity and a few tactful moments of intimacy, he could as easily have made the story in 1955 as 1995.
There is nothing treacly, sugary, or sentimental about the storytelling. Eastwood has an unerring eye and ear for people's natural behavior, and he's largely content to point his camera in the right direction and let the script and characters take care of themselves. So you won't find any soft-focus montages with dreamy background music here. Instead, we get clear, well-focused medium shots, a few close-ups, and a simple jazz-inflected score by Lennie Niehaus. It works perfectly.
The children reading their mother's memoirs work perfectly as well, providing a proper counterpoint to the affair they're discovering for the first time. The grown children, one an ultraconservative married man and the other in the midst of a divorce, bring another dimension to the tale, and what they see and learn is what we as an audience see and learn.
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