James Ivory (1990)
James Ivory’s portrait of a middle-aged, middle-class, mid-American couple in the middle years of the twentieth century makes its (few) points in the first fifteen minutes then keeps restating them for close on two uneventful hours. We soon perceive the discreet tyranny of the outwardly impeccable Walter Bridge (Paul Newman), a respected Kansas lawyer, and that his desperately ingratiating wife India (Joanne Woodward) is either too witlessly naïve to recognise, or too scared to admit, the fact. The script, an adaptation by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala from novels by Evan S Connell, indicates but doesn’t develop the personal and sexual tensions at work in the lives of the Bridge parents and their three children. The patronising legends on the screen at the end of the film (which tell us what happened to the characters subsequently) underline with satisfaction the family’s stagnant conservatism. It’s not surprising, within this undramatic scheme, that the few colourful bits of Mr & Mrs Bridge seem melodramatic. In a satirical demonstration of Walter’s imperviousness to external pressures for change and India’s worried, dogged deference to her husband, the Bridges resolutely refuse to be deflected from their dinner in the country club as a tornado rages and all the other diners flee. The sudden symbolism of the scene is not only obvious but incredible: you feel the Bridges are too socially correct to make a spectacle of themselves in this way. Mrs Bridge’s unconventional friend Grace is driven round the twist by the suffocating, complacent formality of the world she inhabits and its demeaning expectations of the wives of successful men but, as Blythe Danner plays her, Grace is so incongruously eccentric from the start that you can’t understand how she was ever acceptable to the group of which she’s a distracted, frustrated fragment. Nor is it clear why, if Mr Bridge is typical of his time and place and class, all the other town bigwigs so easily accept the lustfully life-affirming company of the local psychiatrist (Simon Callow with a cartoon Teutonic accent) and allow their wives to go to him for analysis.
The two stars are defeated by the mean-spiritedness of the material. Paul Newman scrupulously avoids condescension but the actor’s sense of fair play contradicts the script’s definite, smug contempt for Mr Bridge; although he gets a hold on the role eventually, Newman expresses, more than anything else, uncertainty. (Besides, pomposity, however quiet, doesn’t come easily to him.) Joanne Woodward gives a surprisingly busy (Oscar-nominated) performance. Combining some odd, old-lady movements with an alarming perkiness, she trots round like a geriatric on speed and works up an exhausting repertoire of doe-eyed simpers. Woodward’s characterisation epitomises the film: she has defined Mrs Bridge by the time the opening titles are over. What’s irritating about India fuses with what’s tiresome about Woodward’s playing of her. This is an example of a performer being overpraised because her style is so different from usual: you can’t miss the fact that Joanne Woodward, whose trademark is a sane, unforced realism, is acting her socks off here. The whole picture and the praise it received from plenty of critics are an illustration of a tendency to mistake lack of action for psychological penetration. Margaret Welsh, Kyra Sedgwick and Robert Sean Leonard are the three Bridge children. (The last-named seems to have cornered the current market in being parentally oppressed: he was also the suicide in Dead Poets Society.) Austin Pendleton has a good, unpredictable bit as India’s former art teacher, fallen on hard times and trying to sell subscriptions to ‘Doberman’ magazine. The cinematography is by Tony Pierce-Roberts.
[1990s]
