"Mr. and Mrs. Bridge"
                Reviewed by Linda Lopez McAlister
            For The Women's Show, WMNF-FM, Tampa, FL

   Today I want to talk about "Mr. and Mrs. Bridge." Given its
quintessentially American setting in Kansas City in the 1930s and
'40s, this might seem an odd choice for International Women's
Day, but as a matter of fact it is in large measure the work of a
very "international" woman. This is one of many films, including
"A Room With a View" and "Passage to India," created by the
extraordinary trio of filmmakers: Indian producer Ismail
Merchant, American director James Ivory and screenwriter Ruth
Prawer Jhabwala who is German born, of Polish-Jewish descent and
married an Indian.  Her screenplay is in this case an adaptation
from the novels by Evan Connell.  It is, I think, a remarkable
achievement.

      Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, Walter and India, are a proper upper-
middle-class, middle-aged, middle American couple, in the middle
of the Depression--yet financially well off. I kept thinking to
myself, "I know people like them."  Nothing very dramatic or
unusual happens to such people, so how do you portray their lives
on the screen?  Ordinarily the screenwriter would make something
interesting happen to them, produce a script with a rather
standard narrative structure that starts with these lives in a
state of equilibrium, then introduce some upheaval or disruption
of that equilibrium and then resolve that disruption so that at
the end of the film either things are back to normal or a new
state of equilibrium is reached and all the loose ends get tied
up.  Of course life isn't typically like that--"real life"
doesn't always have a tidy narrative structure with beginning,
middle and an end.

     My sense is that Ruth Prawer Jhabwala set herself the task of
making Mr. and Mrs. Bridge seem like real people by writing a
screenplay that is more like real life and less like fiction.
That means she had to violate the usual conventions of narrative
structure.  How do you do that and still not leave the audience
either bored or unsatisfied with the film?

      First we just sort of cut in to the Bridge family's life at
a seemingly arbitrary point somewhere in the mid-thirties.
Walter (played to perfection by Paul Newman) is a very straight-
laced, proper, stern lawyer, India (played, if possible even more
perfectly by Joanne Woodward) his devoted, dependent, though
sometimes bewildered proper wife and mother of two daughters and
a son. Rather than there being one big dramatic crisis to be
resolved there are multiple small ones which reveal the workings
of these people's minds and psyches to us. For example, Walter's
refusing to interrupt his dinner at the country club and go into
the shelter in the cellar when a tornado is heading in their
direction--and India, despite her obvious terror, not even daring
to suggest that she might want to be anywhere but at his side,
letting him do the decision-making for them both.

      Several of the episodes in the film show us the emptiness
of the lives of upper-middle class women and how they react to
the traps they find themselves in.  Blythe Danner's stunning
portrayal of India's best friend Grace is worth the price of
admission alone.  These women are a generation earlier than the
housewives Betty Friedan wrote about in The Feminine Mystique,
but they suffer from the same malaise.

    Another way this film works against the normal conventions is
that we're set up to expect that Walter is going to die of a
heart attack; in a typical Hollywood film he would have, right on
cue, in this film, as in life, such things are not so predictable
and he lives to a ripe old age. The big challenge for a
screenwriter is how do you end a film like this if you've
consciously avoided a dramatic crisis to be resolved?  If you
just stop, it's going to seem odd to audiences conditioned to
seeing films with endings, whether happy or sad. Ruth Prawer
Jhabwala's novel solution to this problem is simply to stop right
in the middle of a particularly telling incident and then in a
few seconds with subtitles under home-movie-like footage of the
Bridge family when the kids were small, tell us what happened to
Walter and India that particular day and to all of the members of
the Bridge family for the next 40 years up to the present. It
sounds odd, but it's an ingenious solution and it works.

   I think you'll want to see Mr. and Mrs. Bridge; it's a very
intelligent, moving and important film, with some of the best
film acting you'd ever care to see.