"This kind of certainty comes but once in a lifetime."
4 Stars
4 Stars
I never got around to seeing this movie. It was always billed as the quintessential "chick flick". And well, it was. But "chick flick" makes this movie sound cheap, and cheesy. This was well written, flawlessly acted, and painful all at once.
Housewife Francesca Johnson (Meryl Streep) gets four days to herself while her family is off at a state fair, and meets a passing stranger (Clint Eastwood) who is photographing the covered bridges of Iowa for National Geographic. As romance ensues this becomes four days that she will find herself obsessed with till the day she dies.
I love that this movie is told through Francesca after her death, and is slowly unfolded in journals for her grown children to discover. Yes, it is a love story, but it's also about the moment of discovery, I feel we all have at one point, that a mother is a woman. Just an individual woman, who had wants, disappointments, and the most hardest to grasp, sex! The son and daughter reading these accounts by their mother was great to watch. They got angry, they felt lied to, and then they accepted her. Forgave her. In her death, and through her story she was able to teach them her last life lesson. To love with everything you have.
I have a movie project which I touched on in my intro, that I am slowly working to see all Meryl Streep's films. She is just ...you know, I don't even have a word for how talented she is. There were a few scenes in this film, where through just her eyes you can hear everything she is thinking. How does she do that?!
Watching her hand on the car door, you just want to scream "Go! Go!". Even her hand is great at acting!
This movie felt the same to me as The Notebook. I was all ready for that to be violin strings, and the teary "I don't want to leave you." scene, but that movie wasn't like that either. Thanks mostly to Rachel McAdams who is a phenomenal young actress. Which brings me to my final thought, that these great performances make the difference between a "chick flick" and a really great movie.
Housewife Francesca Johnson (Meryl Streep) gets four days to herself while her family is off at a state fair, and meets a passing stranger (Clint Eastwood) who is photographing the covered bridges of Iowa for National Geographic. As romance ensues this becomes four days that she will find herself obsessed with till the day she dies.
I love that this movie is told through Francesca after her death, and is slowly unfolded in journals for her grown children to discover. Yes, it is a love story, but it's also about the moment of discovery, I feel we all have at one point, that a mother is a woman. Just an individual woman, who had wants, disappointments, and the most hardest to grasp, sex! The son and daughter reading these accounts by their mother was great to watch. They got angry, they felt lied to, and then they accepted her. Forgave her. In her death, and through her story she was able to teach them her last life lesson. To love with everything you have.
I have a movie project which I touched on in my intro, that I am slowly working to see all Meryl Streep's films. She is just ...you know, I don't even have a word for how talented she is. There were a few scenes in this film, where through just her eyes you can hear everything she is thinking. How does she do that?!
Watching her hand on the car door, you just want to scream "Go! Go!". Even her hand is great at acting!
This movie felt the same to me as The Notebook. I was all ready for that to be violin strings, and the teary "I don't want to leave you." scene, but that movie wasn't like that either. Thanks mostly to Rachel McAdams who is a phenomenal young actress. Which brings me to my final thought, that these great performances make the difference between a "chick flick" and a really great movie.
1 comments:
Thank you so much for your write-up on this movie. It's my absolute favorite love story of all time. You might be interested in reading an excerpt from an Eastwood interview discussing some of the scenes done with no rehearsal and if you know anything about Clint Eastwood's direction, he is well known for using scenes on the first take...and just look at the performance by Meryl Streep, speaking with an accent no less.
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"He is no different with the cast, to whom he listens attentively when they talk about their characters before telling them that they shouldn’t worry too much, that they will know what to do when the time comes. The results sometimes prove to be spectacular. So it was with Meryl Streep, an actress who is reputed to be an intellectual, who delivered probably her most astonishing portrayal in the role of the farmer’s wife in The Bridges of Madison County.
“Meryl’s used to working with directors who do a lot of rehearsals, take a lot of preparation time. In this case, she didn’t have time to think, she couldn’t do anything but concentrate on her character and play it, nothing else. She couldn’t think about the scene beforehand. After a very short time, she was asking to shoot with no rehearsal herself. Sometimes I’m content with talking a little with the cast, then, in front of the camera, I ask them to say something other than what had been planned, to change the lines. In The Bridges of Madison County, for the scene with me telling the yarn in the kitchen, we shot with no rehearsal. But since I had to film the scene from different angles, every time I told the yarn differently.”
(From Le Nouvel Observateur, March 5, 1998"
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