Eastwood: The Bridges Of Madison County (1995)

In his long and varied career, Clint Eastwood has only made one out-and-out romance, but anybody encountering Eastwood through it would assume that it was made by a master of romances, a director who had spent his whole career perfecting the genre. In large part, that’s because of how radically Eastwood makes over Robert James Waller’s novel in his own image – where Waller’s vision of the fleeting, three day romance between a National Geographic photographer (Eastwood) and an Iowa housewife (Meryl Streep) was florid and baroque, Eastwood’s prescient enough that he works best as a director of silence to cut down everything but the bare bones of the story, filling in the rest with texture. And it’s one of his most textural, ambient films – from the moment Robert Kincaid meets Roberta Johnson, they’re drawn into a three day conversation (there’s virtually nobody else in the film) that’s confined to a few rooms in Roberta’s house, and the covered bridges that have brought Robert to the area. As the conversations become more sensual and intimate, they’re punctuated by longer and longer silences – silences that enliven Robert and Roberta, as well as the audience, to the vast ambient minutiae that surround them, in Eastwood’s most fully formed and elusive soundscape. At its strongest, it feels as if Eastwood has actually managed to fuse directing and deep listening, shooting Streep as if he were attending to her face as minutely as possible, in a kind of forerunner to the deep storytelling in Million Dollar Baby, the only other film of his that really approaches this level of hush. And that hush constellates around the bridges themselves, which tend to have more of a sonic than a visual presence, condensed to cool, dark recesses that leave nothing to do but listen, let the sound wash over you, as if their peculiar beauty was that, sonically at least, they managed to take you under their streams rather than across them. Ravishing in its melancholy, it’s hard to think of a better vehicle for Eastwood’s glassy brand of American romanticism than this lost love of a National Geographic photographer, as the film gathers all his elegaic lyricism into his gentlest performance, a beautifully orchestrated entry point into middle age.