BEFORE: My tour of relationships/infidelity now takes me to Iowa. Linking from last night's film (which wasn't easy), George Segal was also in "Flirting With Disaster" with Lily Tomlin, who was also in "A Prairie Home Companion" with Meryl Streep (last heard in "The Ant Bully").
TCM finishes things up in Austria today with "The Guardsman", then heads for the Caribbean, where I'm going to pick up another Errol Flynn pic, "Captain Blood", and then it's on to South America, where I'll pass on "Flying Down to Rio", but I will add "Kiss of the Spider Woman".
THE PLOT: Photographer Robert Kincaid wanders into the life of housewife Francesca Johnson, for four days in the 1960s.
AFTER: Technically, this is just a reversal of "The Seven Year Itch", without the comic elements. An Italian-American woman's husband and kids go off to the state fair, and she's alone for what, a few hours, before a National Geographic photographer pulls up to the farmhouse, looking for directions. The timing is more than a little suspect here. Yes, I realize that in this comparison, Clint Eastwood (last seen in "Gran Torino") is in the Marilyn Monroe role - I'm comfortable with that.
In fact, all of the timing seems rather convenient - the affair of a lifetime, unfolding in just four days? Most people take more than that long to decide even if they want a second date with someone. But this is clearly a female's fantasy relationship - Clint (or Brad, or George) drives up to the house, and is literally, as well as figuratively, lost. If only a kind and foreign-accented woman could give him, and his life, some direction, plus some home-cooked meals! Someone to listen to his tales of lonely life on the road, taking exotic pictures for National Geographic...come on!
I acknowledge that infidelity occurs - I just doubt that it occurs like THIS. I don't find depictions of infidelity distasteful, but neither do I feel that they should be glamorized. The saving grace here is that the romance is seen in flashback, as imagined by the late woman's children, reading her journals. So it's possible that the affair was overly romanticized between the time it happened, and the time she wrote about it.
What the movie gets correct is the fact that once doubt is cast into the equation of a marriage via another potential partner, nothing will ever quite be the same afterwards, regardless of the choices made. And Streep's character has to make an impossible choice - if she leaves with her new flame, she realizes their relationship won't be the same on a day-to-day basis, but if she stays with her husband, she'll always wonder about the road not taken.
I speak from some experience here - I don't often write here about my first marriage, but my first wife became enamored with someone in our circle of friends, and I realized they were spending more and more time together. They shared similar musical tastes, believed in the same causes, etc. - and eventually she came to believe that maybe they were meant to be together, and we weren't. I forced her to make a choice, and at first she did try to exclude this other person from her life, but the damage had been done. (Yes, the other person was a woman, and her coming to terms with her orientation played a role here, but the principle is essentially the same.) Part of the reason that I don't often write about this experience is that I still have hopes of turning it into a screenplay - I just don't have the time to write it.
But this took place over a period of months, if not years - so I may buy into the situation here, but not the time-frame. Apart from Francesca's choice, however, there was very little suspense or tension in the film - the affair was handled so matter-of-fact that it almost seemed mundane. All the little details just seemed like window dressing. So congrats on making infidelity appear boring.
It seems like a rather obvious NITPICK POINT, but Francesca's choices are (apparently) to tell Robert where the covered bridges are, or accompany him. So, there's a local ordinance prohibiting a woman from taking pen to paper on a Sunday, and drawing him a map? I suppose if he'd been a proper world traveler and bought a map at the gas station (or if it were set in modern times and he had a GPS), we wouldn't have a movie premise, now, would we?
Come to think of it, why doesn't he have a map? Maybe that's his game, after all - "Oh, I'm lost, please help me, kind local-but-foreign-accented woman!" Which brings me to NITPICK POINT #2: maybe we're just seeing this guy's moves, and he actually does have a girl in every world city. That "once in a lifetime" line? Pure gold, and I bet a lot of players are using it now. "But wait," you say, "didn't he dedicate his photo book to her?" Well, technically, no, he dedicated it "For F." Which you could take as being discreet - or you could surmise, he's in the publishing industry. Even in the late 60's, it wouldn't be too hard to have 23 different versions of the book published - since he probably doesn't have any girlfriends with names beginning with Q, X or Z. Real slick, man - it's not like the book is titled "Four Days with a Woman of Italian Descent in Nowheresville, Iowa".
Also starring Annie Corley, Victor Slezak
RATING: 4 out of 10 pickup trucks
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