A Very Unexpected Clint Eastwood Blockbuster Is Streaming
Clint Eastwood is many things: Spaghetti western icon, Dirty Harry, jazz aficionado, Academy Award-winning director, and unparalleled observer of aging American masculinity. There was also that time he talked to an empty chair in public for nearly 12 minutes. However, Clint Eastwood is almost never thought of as a romantic lead. Despite that, one of his biggest blockbusters of the 1990s saw him playing exactly that role against legendary actress Meryl Streep. That movie is 1995’s The Bridges of Madison County, an acclaimed yet nearly forgotten romantic drama that is currently streaming on HBO Max.
The Bridges of Madison County stars Clint Eastwood as Robert Kincaid, a National Geographic photojournalist on assignment to photograph the titular historic bridges of Iowa in 1965. Meryl Streep plays Francesca Johnson, an Italian war bride living a rural life with her husband (Jim Haynie) and teenage children. After her husband and children leave for a multi-day trip to the Iowa State Fair, Clint Eastwood happens by the family farm and asks for directions. Meryl Streep ends up guiding him around the area, and they begin a passionate affair over the course of four days.
There is very little action that happens in The Bridges of Madison County, a practically unheard-of event for Clint Eastwood at the time. But the movie is not so much a dramatic love affair between the Man with No Name and the Grand Dame of American Cinema as a brief connection between two aging people (Meryl Streep was 46 at the time, Clint Eastwood 65) that haunts them for decades after. The Bridges of Madison County is a rare kind of movie: a romance between adults that is as deeply emotional as it is physical (though the sensuality of the movie is not to be underrated) and in which the drama does not emerge from obvious plot points like abusive partners or work opportunities, but from the inertia of everyday life.
The movie was adapted from the best-selling novel of the same name by Robert James Waller, and it very much feels more literary in tone than the average Clint Eastwood film. Surprisingly, the framing device of Meryl Streep’s grown children finding her notebooks and letters from Clint Eastwood after her death decades later and trying to piece together what happened was an invention of the movie, suggested by Steven Spielberg. The original novel presents the fictional story as an actual event being turned into a novel by an unnamed narrator (assumed to be Waller). The adaptation of the film, which eventually was scripted by Richard LaGravenese after a series of different drafts from various writers, is very much in line with a number of movies at the time in which Midwestern Babyboomers take stock of their lives. It exists in a continuum with Field of Dreams and Fried Green Tomatoes, movies obsessed with trying to find meaning in lives that have gone dull by examining moments of the past.
The majority of the film is concerned with Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep having long discussions, mostly in her farmhouse kitchen. This might be the only movie in which Clint Eastwood quotes W.B. Yeats, but it is just one of a number of films at the time in which he presented himself as an aging man coming to terms with his life, like Unforgiven and In the Line of Fire. Of course, Clint Eastwood would continue to mine this particular theme for the next 30 years. But The Bridges of Madison County might be the movie that most shows him as the quiet, artistically-inclined man he seems to be in real life than someone who can gun down a car of robbers on a San Francisco street. It may be one of the most atypical movies of the film icon’s entire career, but it is difficult not to see it as one of his more revealing.
The Bridges of Madison County was an enormous hit, grossing $182 million at the box office (off a $22 million budget). It was also well-received by critics, favorably comparing it to the source material; it currently holds a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. However, Clint Eastwood would quickly return to thriller films like Absolute Power and Blood Work and has never really made another movie that portrayed him in quite this light. If nothing else, The Bridges of Madison County is worth watching to see him play so himself, yet against type.
