Ages Of Love Movie Based On Waller’s ‘Bridges Of Madison County’ Brings Romance Of Autumn Love To The Big Screen

Let us now praise Robert James Waller. Not that the semireclusive author of “The Bridges of Madison County” wonders or cares what anybody outside his Alpine, Texas, home thinks of him or his work anymore.

For three years, members of the media have been doubling over with laughter (and envy) at his wildly successful novella.

But while reviewers sniff and snicker at its bittersweet plot and hopeful message, millions have stained its 171 pages with big, salty tears.

When the long-awaited film version with Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood as lovers Francesca Johnson and Robert Kincaid previewed in Dallas, you could have heard a Kleenex drop. No wheezing, no slurping, no crinkling of candy bar wrappers. Not even muttered asides when Harry the truck first rumbles by. By then, the audience was 30 years away in southern Iowa. Toward the end, there was a whole lot of snifflin’ goin’ on. And afterward, an old boy leaving the theater advised the local publicist, “You better hand out hankies when it runs.”

Give the rich Waller his due.

He set America reading (and rereading) his loopy, pale-violet prose.

He struck a blow for mature love and sex. His hard-bodied hero is 52. And at 45 (the same age as Francesca) and 65, respectively, costars Streep and Eastwood make a strong case for sensuality seen through bifocals.

He mined a deep vein in the feminine psyche - the hope that somewhere out there is a man who will chop the carrots in the kitchen and still cut the mustard in bed. Men harbor the same hope for a woman, of course. They just don’t want to read about it. Or see it on the big screen.

And, finally, he reminded us of the power of dreams.

Six months in his third-floor two-room flat with Camel-filled ashtrays might have taken the bloom off the “last cowboy” (as rugged Robert Kincaid calls himself) for Francesca Johnson. But duty prevailed. And just as “Casablanca’s” Bogie and Bergman will always have Paris, Waller’s lovers will always have Winterset.

The thrust of Richard LaGravenese’s script remains true to the book, but devotees will note some alterations.

The order of the narrative is slightly changed. In the book, Francesca’s grown son and daughter learn of their late mother’s dalliance after carrying out her last wishes. On screen, the outraged brother and starry-eyed sister read of Mom’s indiscretion, then complete her outof-the-blue request.

LaGravenese drops the first-person narrator, plays down the camera business (the book’s “20 intense minutes of the kind understood only by soldiers, surgeons and photographers”) and adds two new characters - a chatty, intrusive neighbor and a locally shunned fellow adulteress.

Mercifully, the strains of “Autumn Leaves,” which float through the book, are not heard in the film. Nor does Eastwood, who warbled in “Paint Your Wagon,” strum the guitar and “sing of whaling ships and desert ways” as his character does on page 109.

Streep spends most of her time in housedresses, not faded tight jeans; her dressy frock has a shawl neck, not thin straps; and she comes from Bari, not Naples, in Italy. Despite the thing made of the photographer’s sandals in the book, Eastwood wears heavy-soled brogans.

But these are niggling things. Waller - and now Eastwood - have tapped into a universal longing for a powerful, mystical man on a comet to brighten our workaday lives. Instead, we keep running into ordinary asteroids. In the end, we must be our own impassioned, wise Robert Kincaids.