My Year with Meryl Streep: The Bridges of Madison County (1995)
By: Brian Rowe
Tags: Meryl Streep, Romance, Movies, Film, Oscars

My Year with Meryl Streep: The Bridges of Madison County (1995)

A look at the classic Clint Eastwood romance that earned Meryl her tenth Oscar nomination!

Photo by Kiwi Thompson at Unsplash

I recently spent a whole year watching a Meryl Streep film every week, and I thought I’d share with you some of the reviews I wrote for her many classic films!

The Bridges of Madison County (1995)

A quiet romantic film released in the midst of summer, starring, of all people, Clint Eastwood? The Bridges of Madison County was, like the runaway novel bestsellers like The Da Vinci Code and The Help, always going to be made into a movie — at one point Sydney Pollack circled the project with Robert Redford as his lead, and even Steven Spielberg briefly considered taking it on — but what kind of a movie was it going to be? Would it be too melodramatic? Would the two leads have any chemistry?

When Eastwood — who in 1995 was most known for playing Dirty Harry, an action hero, and for directing Unforgiven, a dark western — was announced to be the co-actor and director of The Bridges of Madison County, there were likely more than a few eyebrows raised. Approaching age sixty-five, he was an unlikely romantic lead as the handsome photographer Robert Kincaid, but what’s even more surprising is that the higher-ups at Warner Bros. wanted an actress far younger than what the part called for.

Many actresses could have played the pretty and complex Italian housewife Francesca Johnson, age forty-five. Jessica Lange and Isabella Rossellini were in contention for the lead, and the stunning French actress Catherine Deneuve (in her early fifties at the time) auditioned for the role. Younger actresses likely considered were Michelle Pfeiffer, Demi Moore, Rene Russo, and Kim Basinger, but Eastwood didn’t want to hear any of it. He made one phone call, to a beloved actress who hadn’t had a role this layered and deep since playing Lindy Chamberlain in A Cry in the Dark.

Meryl didn’t so much care for the book, but she loved the script and she signed on immediately, making The Bridges of Madison County her first significant role in a drama in seven years. And while she’s been nominated for an Academy Award nineteen times and counting, her Oscar-nominated performance as Francesca is easily one of her five greatest performances in her illustrious career. She is so quietly heartbreaking in this that she basically overshadows everything else in a flawed but effective film, one of Eastwood’s best.

The story is simple. Living in small-town Iowa, Francesca has a rare four days to herself, when her husband and two children leave to attend the Illinois State Fair. On day one, an attractive photographer arrives at her doorstep, asking for directions to a nearby bridge he has been commissioned to take pictures of. She shows him how to get to his destination, and from that moment on, they start spending more time together. They have dinner and drive to more bridges and talk about their histories and potential futures.

By day two, it’s clear that Robert and Francesca are smitten with each other, but is it possible that they have a happily ever after? Francesca has a life in Iowa, while Robert is constantly on the move, never settling in one place. In the end, he asks her to come away with him, and be the adventurous woman her current husband never allowed her to be. The decision she finally makes, in the film’s haunting and most famous scene, is one that resonates with the viewer for days.

Eastwood supplies The Bridges of Madison County with just the right tone. The same leisurely way he paced his Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby, he gives this film a quiet authenticity that keeps it from ever becoming too heavy-handed. Another director might have filmed too many scenes of Robert and Francesca gazing into each other’s eyes while the music swells and the camera spins around them so many times you get dizzy. There is a tender scene where the two just stare at each other for a moment, but it’s done in a subtle, non-cheesy manner, with the music coming from the nearby radio.

And while the two fall in love in a mere two days, the slow pacing allows the viewer to buy that these lost souls could fall for each other so fast. The pairing of Meryl and Eastwood seems like an unlikely one, especially for a romance, but their chemistry is electric, the kind that is rarely seen in movies. Unlike so many forced romantic pairings, they actually feel right together, and their attractions for each other from the get-go feel earned.

One of the great surprises of the movie is Eastwood’s performance. While it’s difficult to watch him in any movie and forget you’re watching Clint Eastwood — unlike Meryl, who so easily disappears into each role she plays — he shows a different, more vulnerable side to his personality in The Bridges of Madison County. This is probably his sweetest performance ever captured on screen, and one of his most natural. Not too many actors could say the line “This kind of certainty comes but just once in a lifetime” with a straight face, let alone pull it off as an authentic movie moment, but somehow, he does. In addition, the image of Eastwood standing in the rain at the end, forever alone, clinging onto a false hope that Francesca will run away with him, is a beauty.

But as fine as Eastwood is, he as the director wisely made this Francesca’s story, and Meryl’s movie. The Bridges of Madison County is easily Meryl’s most stellar dramatic performance of the 1990s. Every choice she makes is a good one, both the big and the small. Her Italian accent is without fault, but Meryl went much farther to bring this character to life. She reportedly gained fifteen to twenty pounds, which gives the character a specific look, one of a woman who, while pretty, has been beaten down a bit by a sedentary life.

Just the way she walks, the way she holds herself, suggests a person who rarely feels joy. But when Robert comes around, her body language changes. She moves quicker, with more jubilance in her step. One of my favorite gestures Meryl makes in the whole movie is when she claps her hands together, after Francesca agrees to meet with Robert to go sightseeing. It’s a lovely moment that tells so much with so little.

The role has endless layers. She gets to play goofy, sad, lonely, in love, desperate, at peace. Almost every scene gives Meryl a new note to play. Just the way she laughs in a handful of scenes — especially the one in which Francesca jokes that the flowers Robert gives her are poisonous — is perfectly modulated. She’s great all the way through, but it’s the hauntingly constructed scene at the end, in the truck, in the rain, that pulls at the viewer’s heartstrings the most.

She doesn’t just long for Robert. She has an out-of-body experience as she tugs on that door handle. She knows in her heart she can’t go, but she still doesn’t want to give up the dream. With no words spoken, Meryl tells us in her eyes exactly what she’s feeling. It’s a marvelously acted scene that is probably one of the most famous moments of any romance film ever made. Meryl was rightly nominated for her tenth Academy Award for her performance, but she lost to Susan Sarandon, for Dead Man Walking; in a less competitive year, she likely would have won her third Oscar.

The Bridges of Madison County is not without its flaws. The awkward wrap-around story is too amateurishly acted, and the scene in the truck at the end is so powerful that the final ten minutes, which shows Francesca at an older age, seem unnecessary. But overall, it’s grand entertainment, the kind of film Hollywood used to make all the time in the ’30s and ’40s but rarely in the ’90s.

The book, written by Robert James Waller, might not have been the finest piece of literature ever written, but Eastwood was able to translate these two unique characters and winning themes into a movie that works far better than it should have. Best of all, Meryl, after a seven-year hiatus from leading roles in dramas, rose to the challenge of playing a rich, complex character: a housewife in her forties who still has dreams and ambitions that go beyond her tiny farm in Iowa.

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Brian Rowe is an author, teacher, book devotee, and film fanatic. He received his MFA in Creative Writing and MA in English from the University of Nevada, Reno, and his BA in Film Production from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He writes young adult and middle grade suspense novels, and is represented by Kortney Price of the Corvisiero Agency. You can read more of his work at his website, brianrowebooks.com.