Clint Eastwood has defied the conventional wisdom and actually made a better movie (than the book) of the mega-best-seller The Bridges of Madison County. In doing so, Eastwood has carefully pared down the preposterousness and delivered a simply realized film that works on a variety of levels.
Actually this should come as no great surprise to anyone who has watched the evolution of Eastwood from the silent avenger in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns in the 1960s to the cryptic crime fighter Dirty Harry of the 1970s; from the self-effacing actor working with a chimp in the 1980s to the Academy-Award winning director of the 1990s. His talents as a director are beginning to shine through nearly all of his material.
Anyone who saw his knowing nod at crumbling Western iconography in The Unforgiven and then saw his somewhat metaphysical A Perfect World wouldn’t doubt that Eastwood– not Steven Spielberg-was the perfect choice to helm this project. His decidedly downbeat, dark look at the savageries of emotion leave you grasping for bedrock. The final, wordless image of he, as Robert Kincaid standing in the pouring rain, is as enduring as anything in contemporary cinema.
Tackling the material with a solid script from Richard LaGravenese, who has also written The Fisher King and The Ref, Eastwood works the ground as if he has done it all his life.
Matching Meryl Streep, who is at the top of her game-Italian accent and all-scene for scene, Eastwood, the actor, provides the throughline of the picture while Streep, as Francesca, takes us straight to the heart of the matter.
And again, Streep is quite amazing as she invents still another three-dimensional character out of a twisted but fluent delivery and mannerisms that seem embedded in her soul. She pads around her Midwestern home with added weight and shoos flies away as she dreams of Africa with Kincaid. Her being is so in tune with the character that she plays that her straitjacketed silence seems heartbreakingly real. But, in the four-day scenario depicted here, the tables are turned and Francesca is allowed to be both passive and dominant. Together, Streep and Eastwood work positive magic as they open tear ducts for miles around.
It’s the attention to detail that matters most. It’s what makes great films like To Kill a Mockingbird, Driving Miss Daisy and Tender Mercies. Whether it’s flies on the window pane or a woman’s slip inching just below the hemline, it’s the human nuance that makes this entire film so affecting. Production designer Jeannine Oppewall deserves an ample credit for her dead-on take of a typical Iowa farmhouse during the mid-1960s.
In capturing these things, and much more, Eastwood has fashioned a gentle, soft-spoken eulogy to unrequited love.
The Summer of ’95 also finds another actor, namely Mel Gibson, stepping up to the plate to helm his second directorial effort, Braveheart. Gibson, whose initial effort as director produced the passable Man Without a Face, shows a technical command of the language of film in his treatment of medieval Scottish history. The battle scenes are the highpoint in this film marked by the lush photography of John Toll, who won an Oscar for last year’s Legends of the Fall, but the ensuing political jabber does little more than gum up the works.
Patrick McGoohan makes for a wonderfully slimy King of England while David O’Hara steals the show with his killer work as Stephen, the deranged Irish warrior. Please understand, Braveheart is solid film, it just doesn’t involve. When Gibson smirks, we are immediately thrown into the present and the scene plays more like Lethal Weapon in a time warp instead of the movie that it is. When our lead, William Wallace meets his maker, no one will shed a tear. See Bravehtart for its snippets of history and for its highly-entertaining reenactments of clashing hordes of armies welding maces and shields and all things metallic. As a director, Gibson shows genuine promise with this madness-of-war, mud-under-the-fingernails and blood-in-your-face mini-epic. Just don’t go expecting a film that takes you all the way there and back again.
The art direction is really the star of the latest Batman (Forever) series which sees Val Kilmer effortlessly filling the batsuit vacated by Michael Keaton. Sure, Jim Carrey bends his face around a variety of riddler histrionics while Academy Award winning actor Tommy lee Jones is relegated to alternately screaming and whimpering about his inability to kill our superhero but it’s the look of the sets that dominates the film. The eerie interiors– a mixture of retro-Gothic and post-apocalyptic design– play suitably dark and fantastical in this comic book melodrama that rocketed to the best opening in film history with a take of over $52 million in just three days. Look for Chris O’Donnell pumping fresh blood into the partnership as kind of a punked- up Robin but other than that, go for the stunning looks and not the goods.
Smoke is the movie-going equivalent of sitting quietly and blowing big, lazy smoke rings while ruminating on life’s little quirks. Splendidly played by, among others, Harvey Kietel, William Hurt, Stockard Channing, Ashley Judd and Forrest Whitaker, Smoke was directed by Wayne Wang (who deftly handled last year’s The Joy Luck Club) and written by Paul Auster. In the season of summer spectaculars, it’s a genuine pleasure to watch each of these solid actors wrapping their mouths around such textured dialogue (Judd is particularly incendiary). Like a good smoke at the end of an especially good meal, Smoke is a genuinely satisfying experience.
On video this month the solid choices include Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman, which not only leaves you ravenous for Chinese food but fully satisfied from viewing this bittersweet family drama; I Like It Like That, Darnell Martin’s wholly realistic account of the Hispanic community in New York starring a quite remarkable Lauren Velez; and HBO’s Citizen X starring Stephen Rea and Donald Sutherland in a creepy mass murderer story that will positively chill you to the bone.
