The book was an amazing farrago of sub-Hemingway macho and New Age moon dust. What Eastwood, costar Meryl Streep and screenwriter Richard LaGravenese have done is to bring a semblance of emotional reality to the story. As a result the moviee “Bridges” has much more poignancy than the book. From their first meeting, when Kincaid jolts up to her farmhouse in his pickup, asking directions to the famous Iowa covered bridges he’s shooting for National Geographic magazine, the juice flows between Eastwood and Streep. Francesca’s a quietly resigned woman who came from her native Italy to be the wife of Richard, a decent but unexciting man (Jim Haynie). Robert’s divorced, a loner who buries his emotional dissatisfaction in his solid photographic craftsmanship.
In the book Waller makes him a poet of the camera who “was after art for art’s sake.” But in the movie Robert modestly tells Francesca: “I’m no artist.” Waller’s Robert said stuff like “I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea.” Most of that gas has been siphoned out of the movie, except for an occasional emission when Eastwood is forced to say lines like “I embrace the mystery.” But the erotic tension that develops between Eastwood and Streep is a believable force that rises out of myriad beautifully observed details. Streep slaps her cheeks when she feels herself drawn to him. The self-punishing gesture is somehow European; it goes with her perfect vestigial Italian accent, worn down to a musical nuance in the alien corn of Iowa. Eastwood’s eloquent squint works as well with a camera as it has with a gun.
Eastwood and Streep-it seemed an unlikely pairing, but they work together with a sensual dignity that develops real heat and power. You can feel their desire reviving long-suppressed dreams. Soaking in her bathtub, she looks up at the shower head, still dripping from his recent use. It’s sexier than all the pervasive Hollywood bimbolatry, And where Waller wallows in Robert’s mystic maleness, the film wisely lets Francesca, at one point, angrily accuse him of macho complacency: “You get to be a voyeur, hermit and lover . . . You’re a hypocrite and a phony.”
The movie’s one uncertain device is its framing of the story in flashback, when Francesca’s son (Victor Slezak) and daughter (Annie Corley) find their mother’s diaries after her death 22 years after her four ecstatic days. Their recurrent appearances interrupt the story’s momentum. And the effect of learning about their mother’s affair on their own marital problems lends a taint of glib psychotherapy to a story that should stand on its own romantic feet.
Those feet might have slipped badly without the strength of Streep and Eastwood, just as Tom Hanks gave touching integrity to Forrest Gump. Gumpism was a fantasy of redemption: the mildly retarded Forrest was a kind of holy fool, whose insertion into our recent history canceled its corruptions and restored our innocence. Wallerism is the fantasy of erotic transcendence–four days to redeem a lifetime of conformity. The tremendous success of both fantasies doesn’t say much for our current sense of reality. But Streep and Eastwood seduce you into believing the fantasy. As one of Hemingway’s heroes said, isn’t it pretty to think so?
