Mr. and Mrs. Bridge.

MR. and Mrs. Bridge

Softenings

Mr. and Mrs. Bridge is based on the two celebrated novels that Evan S. Connell wrote ten years apart. In Mrs. Bridge, he told the story from the point of view of the docile upper-middle-class housewife in Kansas City, who lives only for her prosperous lawyer husband and her children, two girls and a boy. Though she has finer stirrings and sometimes even the tiniest rebelliousness in the name of self-expression, these are quickly squelched (usually by herself) as she goes on being a genteelly frustrated but exemplary wife and mother. In Mr. Bridge, a decade later, the same ground was covered from the husband's point of view, with generally different episodes neatly fitted in between those of the first novel. It was a genuine tour de force to get so much complementary mileage out of routine lives without letting the attention flag even if the two books were read in quick succession.

As it happens, I saw the film, which conflates the two novels into just 124 minutes of screen time, before I had read either book. So I was impressed by this, to me, most successful collaboration of the trio Ismail Merchant (producer), James Ivory (director), and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (writer) since their first joint venture, Shakespeare Wallah (1965). As I keep saying, the producer-director team, with or without Mrs. Jhabvala, strikes me as invincible amateurs, their films betraying a certain shakiness, propensity for faux pas, home-movie-ishness despite good production values, and deliberate aestheticizing as of someone buffing his or her fingernails ostentatiously a few times too often.

In Shakespeare Wallah, the Indian locale that is the team's forte was still new to us. Satyajit Ray had tackled it from the native point of view here, however, was a combined Indian and European sensibility at work: Mrs. Jhabvala is a German Jewess educated in England, married to an Indian and living in India. It was a sub-Forster sensibility (as the trio's version of A Room with a View made abundantly clear), but it had its mid-level charm. In Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, however, they seemed to me to have hit it just right.

Connell's novels are written in diminutive chapters a few pages each, each an epiphany of sorts and sufficient unto itself. But the gaps between are no more disturbing than the spaces between the tesserae of a mosaic. The stuffy Mr. B., good-natured in his pompous way the faintly pathetic Mrs. B., saved by being only intermittently aware of her repression the beautiful, flightly daughter the level-headed, stubborn other daughter the withdrawn, inscrutable son--all these are held together by a tone of understated satire. A satire more pitying than biting, but still laughing--sadly--at these lives on which the mute pedal is seldom released, and then only for willfulness or anger.

Or so it seems in the film. But upon reading the books, I find them considerably grittier, more penetrating, better. The lives of the Bridges, their friends, acquaintances, and servants are much more sharply dissected, to reveal deeper flaws, more acrid conflicts, more disturbing victories and defeats. There is a bracing toughness about Connell's writing that the movie frequently Jhabvalizes away. Thus both Mr. and Mrs. Bridge die in the fiction, and die deaths emblematic of their essences the movie, however, keeps both of them alive and adds shamelessly ingratiating endings for the rest of the family as well. These are not even dramatized, but relegated to those irritating final title cards that, ever since Costa-Gavras's Z, have become the lazy or evasive way to end a movie. Good when they serve an ironic purpose, they are intolerable as sappy glossings over.

What greatly helps the movie despite the edulcoration is whatever of Connell does survive, plus the better than usual production values. Thus Tony Pierce-Roberts has evolved into a keen cinematographer, Richard Robbins has toned down the boisterous eclecticism of his scoring, David Gropmans's production design is unassumingly astute. Above all, there is some noteworthly acting.

As Mrs. Bridge, Joanne Woodward is, in a word, perfection. There is in her performance the histrionic equivalent of a singer's perfect pitch: pathos, absurdity, staunchness, vestigial self-assertion, compliant self-effacement, intense (but not exaggerated) solicitude, benighted provincialism, tremulous openness to higher things, and boundless decency are all there in just proportions, sometimes warring with one another, sometimes in meek harmony. It is a performance that moves you so deeply precisely because it does not stink to please, as Hollywood star turns, however deft in other ways, so often do.

As Mr. Bridge, Paul Newman is thoroughly workmanlike, though no more than that yet in the part of a straight but blinkered, attractive but emotionally hobbled man, this will suffice. In the supporting cast, only Kyra Sedgwick, as the rebel daughter, is unsatisfactory everyone else does well or better. There are outstanding contributions from Blythe Danner, as a wife driven mad by suffocating embourgeoisement from Diane Kagan, as a faithful secretary for twenty years whose secret passion for Mr. Bridge finally bursts out, only to leave him more emotionally constipated than ever and from Austin Pendleton (finally not miscast), as an art teacher reduced to door-to-door salesman. And there are pungent contributions also from Simon Callow, Gale Garnett, and others.

The ultimate cravenness of the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala team does, however, exemplify what keeps our cinema from coming of age. As independent filmmakers, they could set an example to Hollywood instead of toeing the line. Though they can, left to their own devices, come up with such horrors as Savages and Slaves of New York, here--prodded by Miss Woodward, who initiated the project--they were on the verge of genuine, major achievement. And, thanks largely but not wholly to her performance, they come within striking distance. Alas, you can't get the full benefit of the film without rushing home and reading the books.

Mr. Simon, NR's film critic, is also theater critic for New York magazine.