When Robert Kincaid’s car first pulls up to the Johnson house in The Bridges of Madison County, Clint Eastwood shoots it like John Wayne emerging from the desert at the start of The Searchers, where Martha watches through the porch columns as her brother-in-law, the man she impossibly loves, wanders from nowhere back into her life. Eastwood isn’t just imitating Ford because the shot composition is stunning or because the sequencing is narratively effective, but because these moments are the same, and the reference to The Searchers immediately establishes that these are two characters which will be inextricably tied to each other for the rest of their lives, and presage their ultimate doom.
Eastwood, despite his intentionally plain-speaking, everyman demeanor, is a charged artist, one who acts in constant conversation with the cinema he partakes in. This is most obvious when he makes something directly critical of the medium (Black Hunter, White Heart), or is working on a metatextual level on the same wavelength as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (as he does in the equally collar-pulling Bronco Billy, albeit Eastwood renders his major statement with the sweetness of a children’s film, whereas Ford acts frustrated that audiences don’t seem to understand what he has been getting at the whole time).
For Bridges, this conversational aspect with Ford and The Searchers goes beyond just simple visual citation as shorthand, and instead builds upon Ford’s notions of how America is constructed through contradictory tradition. At once, Carolyn Johnson and Laurie Jorgensen are the daughters of immigrants, the first generation to be born in America and yet they’re American already. Meanwhile, Francesca gives her life to her children by not giving up her family for her affair with Robert Kincaid, and Ma Jorgensen comments about how one day the country they’re building might become a nice place once her and Pa’s bones are buried in it. Eastwood seems to agree with Ford that sacrifice is something of a historic necessity.
Where the two begin to diverge is how they reflect on it emotionally. Ford’s tone is notably elegiac, but he finds solace in the upholding of institutions, whether his real-life commitment to the Navy or the way Capt. Kirby York dishonestly eulogizes his Custer-like Colonel to preserve the legacy of his beloved cavalry. In Ford, the community is final.
For Eastwood, however, institutions—the U.S. military in Flags of Our Fathers, or his countless examples of cracking family units—can never justify the mistreatment of others. It’s because of this that giving oneself to one, like Francesca deciding to maintain her marriage rather than run off with the man who likely is the one she’ll love the most in the world, is tragic. The beauty of Eastwood is that he doesn’t moralize this as either bad or good, but instead presents it in all of its ambivalence.
The real brilliance of Bridges isn’t just its devastating love story, but the framing device of having the affair revealed to Francesca’s two kids posthumously, having the brother and sister wrestle with what it means to, for the first time ever, truly know their mother and what their mother gave them. Francesca says, “We are the choices that we have made,” but for her, the only choice was tragedy; she could either leave the family that she loves or never see the man that she loves again. But, perhaps, in the world she has given her kids, maybe it is still possible to find something else.