The Bridges of Madison County

Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep make magic in 'The Bridges of Madison County,' a touching version of the best-selling novel of middle American love.

Anyone who loved Robert James Waller's blockbuster novella The Bridges of Madison County will probably come away from the movie version satisfied that due reverence has been paid. The film re-creates Waller's melancholy wisp of a narrative--more of an anecdote, really--with a scrupulousness that would shame most Hollywood versions of classic literature. Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood, as Waller's tenderly plaintive heartland lovers, are so visually and spiritually right they seem to have walked right off the page.

Yet those who haven't read the book may like the movie even more. To say that Eastwood, who directed, has done a first-rate job of adaptation fails to do him justice. What he's brought off is closer to alchemy. He finds the core of sincerity in Waller's novel--an ordinary woman's romantic dreams--and then purges the material of its treacly "poetic" showmanship.

Set in 1965, Bridges tells the story of Francesca Johnson (Streep), an Italian-born farmwife in her mid-40s who has spent the better part of her life in Madison County, Iowa, raising two children and looking after her kindly lump of a husband.

One day, while her family is off at the Illinois State Fair, Francesca has her senses reawakened by Robert Kincaid (Eastwood), a 52-year-old National Geographic photographer who's a kind of globe-trotting New Age Marlboro Man. He wheels up her driveway in his pickup truck, asking for directions to one of the covered bridges he's there to shoot, and ends up staying for dinner. Over the next four days, Francesca and Robert are drawn into a passionate affair. Yet it's the very intensity of their love that dooms it.

As a movie, "The Bridges of Madison County" is touching in a delicate, almost lyrical way. It's a wonderful surprise--an honest weeper for adults. This is a great movie to watch with someone you care about.

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