Authors: Richard Schickel
Beresford, as he should have known, had sailed into dangerous waters and was now caught in an angry riptide. Clint issued an ultimatum: Either this issue was quickly resolved, or they could add a leading man to their list of casting problems. Somehow, Beresford disappeared in the ensuing hubbub. Clint, despite his recent, oft-repeated resolve to “wean myself away” from double duty, took over as director. He got Streep’s number from their mutual friend, Carrie Fisher (“
I guess she hands out my number to anybody,” Streep would say later), and called to ask if he could send her a script.
She was not immediately receptive. Jodie Foster had quit her role in the projected film version of Richard Preston’s
Crisis in the Hot Zone
, and her
Out of Africa
costar, Robert Redford, was quite persuasively talking to her about joining him on the picture (which, ultimately, was canceled). Besides, Clint was just a man in a “boxy” jacket she had met once at a party. She knew little of him as either actor or director, but she knew she loathed Robert Waller’s novel, especially the overripe prose of its love scenes. (Four or five people had given her the book, suggesting that she should play Francesca.) When her assistant asked to borrow one of her copies she tossed it in the wastebasket, saying “You can’t read this—it’s a crime to literature.”
But because of its auspices, she read LaGravenese’s script immediately, and saw that it solved the crime. The bad metaphors were gone, and a subtle rebalancing had taken place. The characters of the son and
daughter, who discover their mother’s diary and must come to terms with its revelations, were enlarged, with their responses adding a certain resonance to the shallow romanticism of the book. Streep went out and rented a couple of Eastwood movies. One was
Unforgiven
, which her husband and son recommended, and in which she found a directorial “wholeness” effortlessly achieved. The other was
In the Line of Fire
, where Clint’s acting impressed her: “I’d never seen somebody of his age do that stuff, go out on a limb that way.”
She signed on, thereby turning
Bridges
into a go project. By so doing—and quite unknowingly, of course—she was instrumental in bringing Clint and Frances’s relationship to its final crisis. Given its precarious condition, Frances guessed that a couple of months’ separation, while he was on location, would be fatal to it. She therefore proposed herself for the role of the daughter, and he rejected her. Personal issues aside, she had just finished another Malpaso picture, and he was more than ever determined not to repeat the Sondra Locke scenario. But still it hurt. According to her, he was not very encouraging when she proposed a visit, though eventually she and the baby did spend a few days in Iowa toward the end of the shoot.
It was centered in and around Winterset, Madison County’s seat (and, another faintly described circle completed, John Wayne’s birthplace). It may have been the happiest of all Eastwood locations. Logistically, this was a comparatively simple production—relatively few locations, a small cast, no taxing action to stage. At its center there were simply two actors acting. And loving it: “One of my favorite things I’ve ever done in my life” is the way Streep put it.
In the doing, it fulfilled her hope that this might turn into the kind of acting experience she had known in the theater, something “we’d be making up as we went along, exploring its evolution.” It also banished her greatest fear. She had worked with two actor-directors, Woody Allen and Albert Brooks, and in her scenes with them she always felt a third, directorial eye staring objectively at her, disconcerting her. This happened only once on
Bridges
—in some shots where Clint was off camera, feeding her lines. She gently called him on it, and he stopped. There was another time, watching dailies of a scene where they were in bed together, half-naked, when she caught Clint making silent gestures behind her back to Jack Green. This time it made her laugh to see him doing his other job when he was supposed to be full concentrated on … well … sex, or, to be more accurate, its simulacrum. He responded with a mock complaint: “It’s very fatiguing work.”
What Streep liked best was his first-take spontaneity. She has a reputation as a “technical” actress, someone who seems to calculate her effects
too closely, and is defensive about it. “I really always have loved that first encounter,” she said one day in her trailer. “I almost always like the first reading better than anything we ever do subsequently.” Therefore, she said, “this is heaven. Clint’s very instinctual. If it feels good, he says, ‘We’re outta here.’ ” As a result, she said, the film’s emotional moments “feel captured, as opposed to set up and driven into the ground.”
Her feelings were reciprocated, and they moved well ahead of schedule. However, when a newsmagazine reported this, it irritated Clint. He thought it made it sound as if they were working carelessly. “We’re not making
Plan Nine from Outer Space,”
he growled. They also were not enacting the cowboy-and-the-lady scenario that many journalists had imagined. They were generally affectionate, mutually respectful, often-joshing colleagues. One perfect autumn morning Clint ambled up to a little bridge where they were to shoot a silent scene in which Streep, in age makeup, reads her last communication from Robert Kincaid, a deathbed letter. The air was clear, the sky blue, a light breeze rippled leaves turning photogenically. Eyeing the scene, he sighed happily: “Great, I’ll make the cover of
Cahiers du Cinéma.”
Joking aside, the film’s visual quality—pretty, but not overwhelmingly so—was emblematic of other, less obvious rebalancings of Waller’s basic narrative. In a genially cynical review of one of his other books, Robert Plunket, himself a novelist, rather cleverly gave a name to the genre this author had virtually invented: “Old Adult” fiction, as opposed to the “Young Adult” books “
aimed at the anxious adolescent, feeling alone in the world, who needs some validation and reassurance.” Old Adult fiction, he said, provides the same service for the middle-aged reader trapped miserably in a Wal-Mart universe. It says: “You’re a good person. Your suffering isn’t depressing—it’s romantic. And to prove it I’m going to reward you with some really good sex for once in your life.”
Streep disagreed. She thought the film, at least, was not about belated rewards, sexual or otherwise, but about “regret. And lost chances. And how you come to things at the wrong time.” She caught in these few words the difference in tone between source and adaptation. Waller in his klutzy way was striving for the ineffable. The movie, more gracefully, strives merely to be treasurable. It grants its lovers a resonant happiness, but not a transformative one.
Clint finished
Bridges
stirred up, on a high. He had never worked so intensely or with such intimacy over so many weeks with an actor or actress of Streep’s caliber. Nor had he ever worked on any film even remotely comparable to this in its romantic force. It made a man think—especially a man approaching his sixty-fifth birthday, especially a
man returning to a house alternately silent and quarrelsome, and rife now with suggestions that some sort of therapy might be in order.
Talk about cognitive dissonance. If he had ever felt “lost, lonely, shut-down” he surely did not now. He had just played a figure who embodied the first two qualities, and though Clint’s grasp on the difference between reality and fantasy was as firm as ever, this character had found at least a momentary transfiguration. Why couldn’t he?
There were good days and bad in the months ahead, as ambivalence tugged him this way and that. If Frances’s fierce zeal to create a life antithetical to his nature, ever resistant to therapeutic pieties, it was yet the product of a loving and idealistic nature. Then, too, there were the interests of a much loved child to consider. And the ugliness of his breakup with Sondra Locke still weighed on his mind.
By the end of the Christmas holidays, though, it was clear to both of them that there was virtually no hope of salvaging their relationship. Now Frances discovered his “other family,” as she called Jacelyn Reeves and the children. She could accept them, but not the fact that Clint had failed to tell her about them. Then in January his old friend Jane Brolin died in an auto accident. When the news came, he cried, the first and only time Frances saw him in tears, the first and only time some of his friends were aware of him reaching out—shyly, indirectly, but palpably—for consolation.
He had always said he was too busy living to think much about dying. But this death, following so closely that of Frank Wells, rendered thoughts of mortality, and questions about the quality of the years left to him, inescapable; he did not want to spend them trying to be someone else’s idea of who he should be, and apologizing for his inevitable failures in that regard. One detected no anger or bitterness in him as he reached this conclusion, though there was some on Frances’s part. But then he had, or thought he might have, someplace else to go.
He had met Dina Ruiz two years earlier in Carmel. She was twenty-eight years old, a news anchor on KSBW, a television station in Salinas, when she was assigned to do a sort of local-boy-makes-good interview with Clint after he won his
Unforgiven
Oscars. She was yet another woman who had not seen many of his films, but they got along very comfortably on camera, so much so that when Dina showed her footage to her boss, Maria Barrs, she—astonishingly—predicted a marriage someday. More immediately, she ordered Dina to expand her piece to a five-part series, and she supplemented her material by doing an interview with Clint’s mother.
They did not see each other again for something like a year. Then they were seated next to each other at a civic function in Carmel, and
once again conversation flowed easily between them. He signaled that, from a distance, he had been keeping up with her by asking knowledgeable questions about some of her recent broadcasts. Now, the more they talked, the more interested he became. She had been raised in Fremont, where his grandmother had lived, and they found that, despite their differences in age, they shared a sense of place, of comparable formative experiences. They came from similarly modest backgrounds; her father was a high-school teacher, her mother (whom Dina had brought along on that first interview) an appliance salesperson at Montgomery Ward. At the end of the banquet he asked if he could call her, and when she gave him her number he said its last four digits—1565—would be easy to remember: “
Your age and mine.”
Later on he would tell people that part of Dina’s attraction is that she is not an actress. It is a shorthand way of saying that she is of his private world on the Monterey Peninsula, a world from which the movie business is firmly excluded, not of his public life. More than that, she is a lively, articulate and straightforward woman, and a born journalist, curious about everything and quirkily well informed. It is a sensibility that is novel and refreshing to him.
They continued to see each other—occasionally, chastely—over the next months. Before he went off to make
Bridges
there was a night when they stayed up until five in the morning “smooching and talking” as she puts it. In January a photographer caught them in a kiss at the Pebble Beach Golf Tournament. It interested the press and, of course, infuriated Frances—and Clint as well. “She’s a friend,” he insisted at the time. “I’m not saying I wouldn’t be interested, if my circumstances were different.…” “We didn’t become a couple,” as Dina genteelly, but firmly, puts it, “until he was free.”
This he was by early spring. Frances and Francesca moved temporarily into the guest house on his Bel-Air property, while she looked for other quarters. He happily continued his fatherly duties, which included baby-sitting when Frances was busy.
He did manage to compose a theme for
Bridges
, which he called “Doe Eyes,” a rather obvious reference to Dina. A gossipy buzz occurred when he appeared without Frances at the Academy Awards ceremony in the spring of 1995 to accept his Irving Thalberg Award. There was no buzz at all when he appeared solo at the premiere of
Bridges
, which also inaugurated the handsome new Steven J. Ross Theater on the Warner Bros. lot on the eve of Clint’s sixty-fifth birthday. By this time it was common knowledge that he and Frances were separated. It was far from common knowledge, however, that he was in love with Dina Ruiz. He
was not at all eager to subject her, and their relationship, to a confusion of realms.
Bridges
launched as gently as any picture he had ever made. Basically, the critics heaved a collective sigh of relief when they saw it. Many could not bring themselves to rave over a movie drawn from this contemptible source, but most could very warmly appreciate the way the sappiness of the novel had been blanched away, leaving, they had to admit, a surprisingly solid emotional core exposed. The film did not jerk tears; it gently encouraged, at most, a rueful tingle behind the eyes.
Almost a year later, in a long critical consideration of the movie, Richard Combs made explicit what was implicit in many of the early notices. The film’s success, he argued, was based on its “
spatial and temporal” framing, which the novel had only hastily attended. It grounds these characters in a realistically observed place and in a historical continuum, as Waller’s fiction does not. Francesca is seen to be rooted in this countryside. And her sense of panic at a future in which she abandons all that it represents in the way of stability and sustaining duty is vividly reflected in Streep’s eyes. Thus real space and imagined time become in the film what they never quite are in the novel—palpable, potent antagonists in a tale moved not by desperate prose but by the easy, natural rhythms of an honestly, and gently, felt reality.
As Combs says, the movie’s erotic passages are “a matter of charged space, the way characters move around each other. What’s kept apart is as important as what’s brought together in this scheme.…” The long sequences—rather daringly extended by a director who simply will not be hurried—in which Robert and Francesca get to know one another, full of tentative approaches and withdrawals, are among the most painfully authentic and suspenseful seduction scenes ever recorded on film.