Who would have imagined Clint Eastwood going all soft and squishy?
Granted, Eastwood has leaned in that direction from time to time — in films ranging from the the little-seen May-December romance "Breezy," which he directed but that starred William Holden, and his country-western melodrama "Honky Tonk Man."
But "The Bridges of Madison County"?
Ask those who have read Robert James Waller's best-selling novel who they might picture in the movie version, and Eastwood is hardly the first name to come to mind. Robert Redford, maybe. Paul Newman even. But Clint Eastwood?
Surprisingly, as an actor Eastwood vindicates himself nicely in the role of veteran photojournalist Robert Kincaid, who is on assignment in the 1960s to photo-graph covered bridges in Madison County, Iowa, for National Geographic. On the first day of his four-day stay, he meets farmwife Francesca Johnson (Meryl Streep) and they slowly sweep each other off their feet.
Plotwise, that's pretty much it. For four days they have a passionate affair, determine that they are each other's lifelong true loves and then go their separate ways. He's a world traveler and she — though originally from Italy — has settled into her life, devoted to her bland-but-good husband and her son and daughter.
And if Eastwood is satisfactory as Robert, Streep is positively luminous as Francesca. Speaking with a light Italian accent and going for a look that combines stay-at-home weariness with intelli-gence and natural beauty. Dis-play-ing an occasional wicked sense of humor (the film could use more), she is so alluring that it's easy to see why Robert can't resist her. And as a result, Streep makes the movie her own.
As director, Eastwood has decided to go for cinematic poetry, and occasionally he manages to achieve just that. In the early stages, the movie has no background music, just ambient sound and occasional jazz/blues songs coming out of the radio. And the camera beautifully photographs rural Iowa, helping us see what the character is looking for in those bridges and the surrounding landscape.
And when background music does finally intrude, it's merely a quiet, pretty piano piece composed by Eastwood himself (with Lennie Niehaus).
One of the weakest links is the framing story. The Robert-Francesca romance is told in flashback after her death, as her adult son and daughter discover her journals and begin reading about it. But the actors (Victor Slezak and Annie Corley) seem stiff and their scenes awkward.
And as with many of the movies he has directed, Eastwood lets it all drag on too long. At 2 hours, 15 minutes, the film sags in the middle — it takes longer to watch the movie than it would take to read the book.
Not that fans of the book will care. At the risk of sounding like a male chauvinist, this may be a cinematic first — women dragging men to a Clint Eastwood movie!
"The Bridges of Madison County" is rated PG-13 for sex, some veiled nudity and some profanity.