BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY, THE - DVD review

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.

Yes, "The Bridges of Madison County" is quite long at 134 minutes, probably too long for its slender narrative, and it does move leisurely along. Yet it's important for the film to take its time uncovering the nuances of Francesca and Robert's relationship; and, besides, human attraction is a hugely complex subject and one cannot take it too lightly or cover it too briefly. With the possible exception of a couple of slow spots in the middle, the film moves briskly enough, given its aforementioned leisurely pace.

The final scenes in "Bridges" are heartbreaking and genuine. It's the kind of filmmaking that never panders, never condescends, never feels contrived. The movie is both thoughtful and touching by turns, and it easily takes its place among Eastwood's best directorial efforts and Streep's best acting (for which the Academy nominated her for a Best Actress Oscar). The movie's ending moved me as few films have.

Video:
The keep case proclaims that the movie is "available on home video for the first time in its picturesque original widescreen glory," a 1.85:1 theatrical ratio. WB's prose may be on the florid side, but it aptly describes the video, which is quite deep and lush. Colors are rich and robust, facial tones are especially realistic, definition is reasonably sharp for a standard-definition release, and a touch of print grain gives the picture a natural texture.

Audio:
The soundtrack, reproduced in Dolby Digital 5.1, is quite subtle yet wonderfully, effectively, evocative. It impressively captures the sounds of country living, the birds, the crickets, the wind, the rolling thunder. The midrange is admirably clear, and the surrounds do a fine job with ambient noises and musical bloom.

Extras:
Several extras accompany the main feature. Of most importance is the audio commentary by film editor Joel Cox and director of photography Jack N. Green. They graciously praise Eastwood for allowing them a healthy degree of freedom in doing their jobs and Eastwood's superb handling of the material, all the time providing a good deal of insight into the filmmaking. Following that is a twenty-nine-minute featurette, "An Old-Fashioned Love Story: Making The Bridges of Madison County," newly produced in 2008 and including reminiscences and observations by the two stars and many of the filmmakers. After that is a four-minute music video, "Doe Eyes," a montage from the film accompanied by soundtrack music and made at the time of the film's release. Things conclude with thirty-three scene selections; a widescreen theatrical trailer; English and French spoken languages; English and French subtitles; and English captions for the hearing impaired.

Parting Thoughts:
While "The Bridges of Madison County" is essentially a two-character drama, it maintains one's attention throughout, perhaps because it reaches down and touches a nerve in all of us. The fact is, although the subject matter is adultery, the story tellers are so convincing in its presentation that we cannot help but feel painfully sympathetic with the participants. This may be a case of a movie being better than the book on which it's based; the film certainly moves one, sometimes to tears.