THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 18, 1995 TAG: 9506140059
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K1 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: HE SAID, SHE SAID
SOURCE: KERRY DOUGHERTY & DAVE ADDIS
LENGTH: Long : 105 lines
KERRY SAYS:
Dave, I can think of only one or two things scarier than having anyone spot me slinking into a weekday matinee with you.
One is having the urge to run off with a grizzled National Geographic photographer in town to take pictures of the piers of Virginia Beach.
As you and I sat there, watching ``The Bridges of Madison County'' - the saga of Francesca and Robert's four-day Iowa farmland-fling - I found myself grinding my teeth.
It wasn't even the ludicrous business of making love in front of a roaring fire - in the middle of summer - that set my teeth on edge. There's Francesca, sweating, swatting mosquitoes and sucking down iced tea one minute, rolling around in front of the fire the next.
The notion that Robert Kincaid - footloose photographer, mysterious man with baby blue eyes - posed a serious temptation to this bored housewife was unreal.
One of the harsh realities we all have to face as we grow up - the key words here are grow up - is that our mates have a tendency to become a tad boring, a bit predictable. You rarely find yourself sitting up into the wee hours discussing childhoods or travels - you need your sleep.
And you don't get an adrenalin rush every time your mate bumps into you in front of the sink, either.
Personally, I find that a relief. I don't want to spend all my time being smitten with Steve. How could I compose myself to arrange car pools, clean the house, play tennis, write a column, read a book?
It's like Francesca whines in the movie: Life is made up of details.
It is. And had she run off with the dashing photographer she would have been swamped with details of a different sort.
Believe me, eventually her hair would have stopped standing on end every time he walked into the room. She would have gotten mighty sick of those unfiltered Camels he was chain-smoking. And the rug burn would have made sitting in that rattly pickup truck pretty unpleasant.
We all know people like these movie characters. They go through life disappointed with the normal people who surround them: The real people who have puffy eyes and morning breath, those real people who are sometimes just too tired to talk to you at the end of the day.
But the real people are the ones who fix you a cup of tea when you're sick, pat you on the back when you feel like a failure - and best of all, come home every night.
Their predictable faithfulness is the one thing you can count on in life. And that's a lot.
Maybe this is what Francesca gets for marrying too young. Those of us who sowed our wild oats and settled down later - before things really got out of hand - find ourselves sighing with relief that things turned out as well as they did.
I for one, never waste a minute looking out the kitchen window for a mysterious stranger with a camera.
DAVE SAYS:
Maybe I'm still jet-lagged, Kerry, or maybe I'm feeling the tug of the coming equinox, but I actually agree with you on this one. Isn't it nice for a change to have a Sunday morning when you and I are buttering the same side of the toast?
``Bridges'' wasn't worth the hoopla it created as a book, and it's not worth a great deal more as a movie. Watching Streep and Eastwood perform it without all the weeping and chest-puffing of the novel's dialogue made it nearly worth the price of a cheapie matinee ticket, even if you did hog the popcorn.
It's just difficult to get all choked over a couple of people who, at middle age, still find it easier to run away from happiness than to pay the price that happiness always seems to command. When Eastwood, as Kincaid, stood there in the rain, soaking wet, with rivulets pouring through those cavernous character lines in his face, I wasn't at all surprised that Francesca turned away from him. He's all wet in more ways than one, I thought.
On the basis of a brief interlude she was supposed run off with a near stranger in a clapped-out old pickup truck just because she was a bit bored, because things had gotten stale around the house.
That's the conundrum that's been hiding in ``The Bridges of Madison County'' for the three years that the book has been mouldering on The New York Times' bestseller list: No woman as deep and soulful as Francesca is described to us would chuck her stand-up husband, her kids, the farm and everything else after a four-day run with a passer-by, even if he did look like Clint Eastwood. If she did, she would lack the depth of character that made her so beguiling to begin with.
It's a psychological pretzel in the plot that even Meryl Streep, with all her coy acting ability, simply cannot unbend.
I did sympathize a bit with Eastwood, though, when I got back to my truck and realized I'd left my sunroof wide open while we were in the theater, through the worst downpour of the spring. As all that water soaked into the equatorial end of my Levis and up the back of my shirt, I realized just how unlikely it was that a fetching Italian farmwife would run off with me in that condition.
I only know one lady who would do that for me, and it took both of us a lot more than four days to understand why. You simply don't build that kind of a relationship on a quick fling in an Iowa farm kitchen.
Life ain't like the movies, Kerry. Most of the time, actually, it's a lot more intriguing.
ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
``The Bridges of Madison County,'' starring Clint Eastwood and Meryl
Streep, doesn't reflect - dare we say it? - real life.
by CNB