The Bridges of Madison County.

Even as I write, the critics of National Public Radio and the better periodicals are reassuring their listeners and readers that they absolutely hated Robert James Waller's book but, since the Clint Eastwood adaptation of The Bridges of Madison County is such an improvement on the original, is so well directed, beautifully photographed and, above all, soaringly acted, they feel no compunction about recommending it.

But I'm a Madison County virgin, so I will have to judge the film on its own merits

And, to cut to the chase, I think the movie is dreadful. It is pretentious trash and has the defining qualities of pretentious trash: glossiness instead of beauty, complacency toward human nature disguised as all-embracing compassion, self-satisfaction posturing as gnomic wisdom.

Richard LaGravenese's script galumphs. Although the prologue. in which the grown children of the recently dead Francesca Johnson (Meryl Streep) discover their mother's journal, runs only a few minutes, it seems to take forever. This is because the dialogue is ludicrous. the rummagings in trunks and chit-chat with lawyers tedious, and the acting of Victor Slezak as Francesca's son risible (although Annie Corley as the daughter provides the one believable element in the movie). When he learns that his mother wished to be cremated, an ordinary enough request (even in Iowa), Slezak's eyebrows start traveling up to his hairline, as if Mom had asked that human sacrifices be offered over her grave.

But finally the kids begin reading and the main story unfolds. Francesca, an Italian woman who married an American G.I., now languishes on an Iowa farm, her sensual and intellectual capacities unplumbed. While the rest of the family is away at a state fair, a National Geographic photographer named Kincaid (Eastwood) stops at the homestead to ask for directions to the bridges he is to shoot and, after she directs him to the bridges, Francesca directs Kincaid to her bed. But not soon after. At least not soon enough as far as I was concerned.

No, the whole first half of this movie is nothing more than Kincaid and Francesca giving themselves permission to go to bed. I have never seen such a smirky, self-entranced, affectedly demure ballet of courtship on or off the screen. There are interminable peek-a-boo sequences in which Streep gazes on the bare-chested Eastwood (still fit in his mid-sixties) from her bedroom window as he washes up in her yard or spies on him from the interstices of a bridge as he snaps away at the structure. These lead to an obligatory woman-discovering-her-own-sexuality moment with Streep examining her nude body in front of a mirror, a scene which might have worked had it been allowed some real sexual voltage instead of being tastefully photographed with Vaseline-coated lenses. When Streep takes a bath, the bubbles dutifully form themselves into sudsy g-string and bra. Once the couple tub together, they sit frozen in a lugubrious tableau as if they were both posing for David's The Death of Marat. For the first session in bed, there are so many lap-dissolves of the embracing bodies that the lovemaking itself evaporates. This isn't sensuality; it's airhead lyricism dished up for New Age hedonists.

Was Eastwood trying to strip an adulterous relationship of its carnality? If so, he certainly wasn't doing it for moralistic reasons, for there's nothing in the movie that indicates that he finds anything wrong with adultery per se. Showing Streep some snaps he took of Africa, Eastwood explains the Dark Continent this way: "There's no imposed morality there." Whenever Streep's son, while reading the journals, splutters indignation at his mother's affair, he is made to look like a ludicrous avatar of such "imposed morality." (His much more agreeable sister, on the other hand, condones the affair.) Asked to describe her husband, Streep tells Eastwood that hubby is "very, very ... clean." "Clean?" repeats the photographer with understandable incredulity. Well, we get the point, even if he doesn't. Besides, this Kincaid is absolutely irresistible, a sensitive artist as well as handsome hunk. To ram this point home, we are treated to the obligatory scene in which our heroine looks through her lover's portfolio and tells him how brilliant his work is, that he must develop his talents, make a book, etc., etc. And don't think that our hero isn't philosophically profound as well as visually talented. "You know," our hero leads in with deceptive casualness, "I like to scribble things down" (oh, oh) "and something I wrote the other day"--wait, let me get a pad, so I can write this down, too--"goes like this: the old dreams were good, but things didn't work out that way. Still, I'm glad I had 'em."

The director originally slated for Bridges was Bruce Beresford, gifted creator of Breaker Morant, Black Robe, and Tender Mercies, but the Australian parted company with Eastwood because Beresford couldn't share his lead actor's high opinion of LaGravanese's script. Dear, intelligent Bruce Beresford!

But what has the script evoked from Eastwood in the way of directing and acting? He has proven, with White Hunter, Black Heart, and Unforgiven, that he can rise to the occasion of good scripts. Can he also transcend bad material?

Well, if the script is unbearably clumsy, the direction is unbearably neat. Examples:

Our hero, getting ready to wine and dine Francesca in her house, spins the dial on the kitchen radio until he finds appropriately romantic music. Not three bars later, not two bars later, but on the very first note of a slurpy song, Streep enters the room in her new dress.

A locally well-known adulteress (not Streep) enters a restaurant where Eastwood is eating in the company of a score of townspeople. Immediately and simultaneously, everyone stops talking. Dead silence as scarlet woman reconnoiters for a seat. A cheerless face looks up as she approaches, then a second, then a third. It's like the entrance of a gunfighter into a saloon, the kind that makes the poker game halt and the Mexican guitar player in the comer stop strumming. Was Eastwood having a flashback to his Sergio Leone days when he staged this scene?

The acting? I had expected the Eastwood-Streep pairing to be fun to watch: master movie minimalist vs. exuberant theatrical chameleon. The match fizzles. Eastwood never sinks beneath competence, but here there's none of the edginess and cold, Calvinistic severity that shade and tighten his best performances. When Eastwood is being laid-back, he's about as interesting as an overaged California beach bum. As for Streep, her Italian accent is both perfect and unobtrusive, but her gestural flourishes (the constant patting of the hair, the self-abnegating walk, the elaborately woozy demeanor) cocoon her characterization instead of developing it. She's done her homework all right, but it remains homework. And (unlike her characterizations in Sophie's Choice and a Cry in the Dark) Streep's Francesca is essentially sexless.

But perhaps that sexlessness has something to do with the strategy of the story itself, a strategy which explains the amazing success of the novel and the almost certain success of the movie. For an era that follows the sexual excesses of the sixties and early seventies and now knows sexual lacerations, sexual plague, and family fragmentation, Waller's tale brings balm. Have an affair, by all means, this story seems to tell us, follow your bliss and all will be well. At the end of her journal, Francesca writes that she was able to endure her marriage precisely because she could draw upon the memories of her affair for emotional nourishment. Indeed, Francesca's bliss engenders marital salvation right into the next generation, for, after reading about it, her children immediately get in touch with their estranged spouses and reconciliations seem just around the comer. (But if they really wanted to insure marriages as perdurable as their mother's, shouldn't they also run out and commit rapturous adulteries?)

And that's why I think The Bridges of Madison County, in print and on celluloid, has been and will be such a stupendous success. It drafts adultery into the human potential movement.