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The Bridges of Madison County (1995)
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Movie Review by Tim 
April 9th, 2008
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The Original Notebook?
Favorite Movie Quote: "This kind of certainty comes but once in a lifetime."
A few weeks ago I was at my mothers house and we started talking about movies. She brought this one up during the conversation and said how it was one of her favorite films. When I left there that day I was so compelled to see it just because my mother liked it, I wanted to see where her taste was artistically with film.
So I picked it up this week as one of my free rentals from Blockbuster. I got several films this week which I really wanted to watch more then this but still there was that curiosity in my mind about this film that my mother liked so much. So it was one of the first ones that I watched.
The film of course tells the story that most humans fantasize about but never see come true. Its a story of TRUE love between two people, soul mates that almost falls in love at first site and has a bond within days stronger then some peoples entire life of marriage.
Meryl Streep has become one of my favorites. She plays an Italian housewife in this film that is married to a good man with children living on an Iowa farm but she dreams of something very different. She loves her husband but she is not IN love with him. Her performance is magical from her mannerisms down to her accent.
Clint Eastwood plays the photographer that has never really settled down and travels from town to town taking pictures of different landmarks for a magazine. Eastwood always delivers and again his directing skills seem to almost supercede his acting abilities.
Of course the two meet and with the husband and kids being gone for four days to a fair they have a short period of time together in which they reach a degree of love that people spend lifetimes to NEVER achieve with each other.
The whole time the story is being told it is after she has died and she left her kids three detailed journals of this affair that she had. Her children are shocked that her mother did this to her father and even as the audience you at first think she is wrong. The more and more you learn about her character the more you start to understand what her current state of mind is and where she is in her life and you quickly forgive her for what she is doing and even start to approve.
You want to dislike Eastwood at first because he is the man trying to get a wife to cheat on her husband but again the love between them is so beautiful that is becomes acceptable.
I guess where this movie hit me the most was the fact that this back story is being read by kids and I almost imagined my siblings and I reading the same books. At the end of the film when they spread her ashes over the bridge and their mothers voice says the final words of the film I felt like crying because it was one of the saddest most dramatic monologue's I have ever heard and all I could think about was it being my mother saying those words and me spreading her ashes.
I can see why some people would get bored with this film but to me it touched on reality and it made me think about people in my own life. This is a story about love and the beauty that surrounds one of the most powerful human emotions on the Earth.
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