Neoconservative romance.

• Author: Sharrett, Christopher

SEVERAL CRITICS have remarked that Clint Eastwood's "The Bridges of Madison County" is the director's "gift for women." Indeed, this film is a major departure for the archetypal tough guy of the post-John Wayne era, although Eastwood's directorial sensitivities have been in evidence in such films as "Bird." It is worth asking, however, what form of a gift Eastwood has offered (at seven bucks a ticket, the concept of "gift" has entered the age of inflation), what his film says to and/or about women, what attitude the film has to the incredibly ballyhooed romance by Robert James Waller, and, most important, what it does with the rather ragged theme of illicit love.

Enough has been said about Eastwood's scrapping of the numbskull prose of the book, a work that could enjoy huge sales only in a time that totally has forgotten what constitutes literature. Much of the current discourse about the film version of "The Bridges of Madison County," the surprise hit of summer 1995, centers on a particular concept of adulterous romance that is very apropos of the neoconservative epoch. While many contemporary married women indeed may take comfort in the film's message (that one can have a secret love, but then must go back to the normalcy and maturity of married life), its implications are perhaps something less than a comfort as viewers see them as part of a larger theme about gender equality and human liberation.

To see how "Bridges" represents a significant fall for Hollywood from a reasonably enlightened position concerning human sexuality, it is useful to compare it to Joshua Logan's "Picnic" (1955). Released at the height of the rigidly conformist Eisenhower era, it offers a lesson about how a director, even working within the constraints of a restrictive production code, can offer a message that is a breath of fresh air, even portentous of a new era to come.

Like "Bridges," "Picnic" takes place in the Midwest and centers around a good-looking drifter who enters a quiescent middle-class farm community. (It is representative of the times that Eastwood's Robert Kincaid, unlike William Holden's Hal Carter, only looks like a rough-hewn bum. Kincaid is appropriately yuppiefied, with an income from his photo work for National Geographic.) Carter becomes involved with a local girl, Madge (Kim Novak), but takes a painful leave after a brief, torrid romance, just as Kincaid loves and then says a tortured farewell to farm wife Francesca (Meryl Streep). Yet...