Screen:

...When Streep takes a bath, the bubbles dutifully form themselves into sudsy g-string and bra...

...A cheerless face looks up as she approaches, then a second, then a third...

...But not soon after...

...It's like the entrance of a gunfighter into a saloon, the kind that makes the poker game halt and the Mexican guitar player in the corner stop strumming...

...Well, we get the point, even if he doesn't...

...No, the whole first half of this movie is nothing more than Kincaid and Francesca giving themselves permission to go to bed...

...clean...

...it's airhead lyricism dished up for New Age hedonists...

...Not three bars later, not two bars later, but on the very first note of a slurpy song, Streep enters the room in her new dress...

...His much more agreeable sister, on the other hand, condones the affair...

...Have an affair, by all means, this story seems to tell us, follow your bliss and all will be well...

...She's done her homework all right, but it remains homework...

...Still, I'm glad I had 'em...

...There are interminable peek-a-boo sequences in which Streep gazes on the bare-chested Eastwood (still fit in his mid-sixties) from her bedroom window as he washes up in her yard or spies on him from the interstices of a bridge as he snaps away at the structure...

...Showing Streep some snaps he took of Africa, Eastwood explains the Dark Continent this way: "There's no imposed morality there...

...But I'm & Madison County virgin, so I will have to judge the film on its own merits...

...But finally the kids begin reading and the main story unfolds...

...Besides, this Kincaid is absolutely irresistible, a sensitive artist as well as handsome hunk...

...This is because the dialogue is ludicrous, the rummagings in trunks and chit-chat with lawyers tedious, and the acting of Victor Slezak as Francesca' s son risible (although Annie Corley as the daughter provides the one believable element in the movie...

...And, to cut to the chase, I think the movie is dreadful...

...When he learns that his mother wished to be cremated, an ordinary enough request (even in Iowa), Slezak's eyebrows start traveling up to his hairline, as if Mom had asked that human sacrifices be offered over her grave...

...This isn't sensuality...

...When Eastwood is being laid-back, he's about as interesting as an overaged California beach bum...

...Can he also transcend bad material...

...But if they really wanted to insure marriages as perdurable as their mother's, shouldn't they also run out and commit rapturous adulteries...

...It is pretentious trash and has the defining qualities of pretentious trash: glossiness instead of beauty, complacency toward human nature disguised as all-embracing compassion, self-satisfaction posturing as gnomic wisdom...

...Examples: Our hero, getting ready to wine and dine Francesca in her house, spins the dial on the kitchen radio until he finds appropriately romantic music...

...repeats the photographer with understandable incredulity...

...RICHARD ALLEVA...

...exuberant theatrical chameleon...

...If so, he certainly wasn't doing it for moralistic reasons, for there's nothing in the movie that indicates that he finds anything wrong with adultery per se...

...And don't think that our hero isn't philosophically profound as well as visually talented...

...It drafts adultery into the human potential movement...

...Dead silence as scarlet woman reconnoiters for a seat...

...He has proven, with White Hunter, Black Heart, and Unforgiven, that he can rise to the occasion of good scripts...

...While the rest of the family is away at a state fair, a National Geographic photographer named Kincaid (Eastwood) stops at the homestead to ask for directions to the bridges he is to shoot and, after she directs him to the bridges, Francesca directs Kincaid to her bed...

...You know," our hero leads in with deceptive ca-sualness, "I like to scribble things down" (oh, oh) "and something I wrote the other day"-wait, let me get a pad, so I can write this down, too-"goes like this: the old dreams were good, but things didn't work out that way...

...Indeed, Francesca's bliss engenders marital salvation right into the next generation, for, after reading about it, her children immediately get in touch with their estranged spouses and reconciliations seem just around the corner...

...For an era that follows the sexual excesses of the sixties and early seventies and now knows sexual lacerations, sexual plague, and family fragmentation, Waller's tale brings balm...

...The match fizzles...

...Dear, intelligent Bruce Beresford...

...To ram this point home, we are treated to the obligatory scene in which our heroine looks through her lover's portfolio and tells him how brilliant his work is, that he must develop his talents, make a book, etc., etc...

...Well, if the script is unbearably clumsy, the direction is unbearably neat...

...At the end of her journal, Francesca writes that she was able to endure her marriage precisely because she could draw upon the memories of her affair for emotional nourishment...

...I had expected the Eastwood-Streep pairing to be fun to watch: master movie minimalist vs...

...But perhaps that sexlessness has something to do with the strategy of the story itself, a strategy which explains the amazing success of the novel and the almost certain success of the movie...

...Was Eastwood having a flashback to his Sergio Leone days when he staged this scene...

...Richard LaGravenese's script galumphs...

...And (unlike her characterizations in Sophie's Choice and A Cry in the Dark) Streep's Francesca is essentially sexless...

...Once the couple tub together, they sit frozen in a lugubrious tableau as if they were both posing for David's The Death of Marat...

...Clean...

...Although the prologue, in which the grown children of the recently dead Fran-cesca Johnson (Meryl Streep) discover their mother's journal, runs only a few minutes, it seems to take forever...

...But what has the script evoked from Eastwood in the way of directing and acting...

...I have never seen such a smirky, self-entranced, affectedly demure ballet of courtship on or off the screen...

...Francesca, an Italian woman who married an American G.I., now languishes on an Iowa farm, her sensual and intellectual capacities unplumbed...

...Eastwood never sinks beneath competence, but here there's none of the edginess and cold, Calvinistic severity that shade and tighten his best performances...

...For the first session in bed, there are so many lap-dissolves of the embracing bodies that the lovemaking itself evaporates...

...RICHARD ALLEVAent...

...Asked to describe her husband, Streep tells Eastwood that hubby is "very, very...

...At least not soon enough as far as I was concerned...

...And that's why I think The Bridges of Madison County, in print and on celluloid, has been and will be such a stupendous success...

...SCREEN ADULTERY PAYS EASTWOOD'S 'BRIDGES' Even as I write, the critics of National Public Radio and the better periodicals are reassuring their listeners and readers that they absolutely hated Robert James Waller's book but, since the Clint Eastwood adaptation of The Bridges of Madison County is such an improvement on the original, is so well directed, beautifully photographed and, above all, soaringly acted, they feel no compunction about recommending it...

...A locally well-known adulteress (not Streep) enters a restaurant where Eastwood is eating in the company of a score of townspeople...

...Immediately and simultaneously, everyone stops talking...

...The acting...

...As for Streep, her Italian accent is both perfect and unobtrusive, but her gestural flourishes (the constant patting of the hair, the self-abnegating walk, the elaborately woozy demeanor) cocoon her characterization instead of developing it...

...Was Eastwood trying to strip an adulterous relationship of its carnality...

...These lead to an obligatory woman-discovering-her-own-sex-uality moment with Streep examining her nude body in front of a mirror, a scene which might have worked had it been allowed some real sexual voltage instead of being tastefully photographed with Vaseline-coated lenses...

...Whenever Streep's son, while reading the journals, splutters indignation at his mother's affair, he is made to look like a ludicrous avatar of such "imposed morality...

...The director originally slated for Bridges was Bruce Beresford, gifted creator of Breaker Morant, Black Robe, and Tender Mercies, but the Australian parted company with Eastwood because Beresford couldn't share his lead actor's high opinion of LaGravanese's script...