It’s amazing what an Oscar can do. Clint Eastwood’s career as a filmmaker was viewed by many as a cranky, uneven enterprise until he was anointed by the academy for Unforgiven. Now it’s clear that in many quarters he can do no wrong, even though A Perfect World and The Bridges of Madison County show no particular improvement in his work. (For starters, both films are longer than they need to be.) His skill in realizing and giving shape to the scripts of others is sometimes praised so highly it’s as if people thought the movie had emerged full-blown from his Zeus-like head. Whatever the achievements of The Bridges of Madison County (and they aren’t to be sneezed at), there’s a strong temptation to credit Eastwood with resuscitating the star system, the Hollywood tearjerker, and classical mise en scene (as I’ve done in my own capsule review). Yet at best he’s performing yeoman service on a so-so adaptation of a lousy novel, plunking his customary persona in the middle of it as if that were all it needed to achieve greatness.
Chaplin remained his own boss, and Monroe and Dean were at least partial collaborators in the creation of their own star personas. But Eastwood seems to have been mainly the passive recipient of his persona, having starred in three Sergio Leone westerns in the mid-60s as the Man With No Name and then being introduced as Dirty Harry by director Don Siegel, his second mentor, in the early 70s. Siegel also directed Eastwood in other pictures, including his first art movie, the underrated The Beguiled (1971)–released the same year as Dirty Harry and Eastwood’s first feature as a director, Play Misty for Me–and probably had an even greater influence on Eastwood’s directorial career than Leone had on his acting career.
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I can accept and even admire the picture as a progressive Republican defense of adultery, in which adultery is seen as a practical means of keeping certain families together. But I have a much rougher time accepting the picture’s truth or falsity moment by moment. Some of this problem is ascribable to Eastwood’s limitations, some of it to the script by Richard LaGravenese, whose other scripts–including The Fisher King, Unstrung Heroes (recently shown in Cannes), and even A Little Princess–have a disconcerting tendency to oscillate between the genuine and the artificial.
What seems more pertinent, however, is the effective appeal made by The Bridges of Madison County to nostalgia of various kinds. I’m thinking of nostalgia for the natural beauty of the rural midwest, nostalgia for smoking unfiltered Camels without fear of censure, nostalgia for old-fashioned love stories, for melodramatic scenes that take place in the driving rain, for romantic jazz, for star performances, for middle-aged passion, for pickup trucks and tractors, for state fairs, for country kitchens, for print dresses, for covered bridges, for slow lap dissolves, even for slow movies in general. And somewhere in this configuration is a nostalgia for the dreams of an all-white America that used to be found on the covers of magazines like the Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s. In this context all that jazz and African jive in The Bridges of Madison County sounds like the return of the repressed.
