<p> Stolid houses and spacious yards. The whir of hand-powered
lawn mowers in the summer, the scrape of snow shovels in the
winter. Romberg on the radio, dinner at the country club once
a week, a trip to Paris once a lifetime. Dad wears vests, Mom
wears funny hats, the maid nips at the cooking sherry (must
speak to her about that). If their son makes eagle scout and
one of his sisters pledges Kappa, does it really matter that
the other daughter decamps for Greenwich Village and a
scattershot involvement with "the arts" that her parents will
never understand?
</p>
<p> Probably not. For what is really important to Walter and
India Bridge (Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward), citizens of
Kansas City a half-century ago, is that the order of their
rounds--diurnal and annual--is preserved. Drama in their
lives is like crabgrass on their lawn: something to be rooted
out the minute it appears and not dwelled upon thereafter.
</p>
<p> Walter can usually wither the untoward with a cold stare
through his steel-rimmed spectacles, though sometimes it is
necessary to bark a few brusque commands in order to send it
scurrying. India, on the other hand, has a more coquettish
relationship with it: she takes painting classes, flirts
momentarily with divorce, psychoanalysis and the ideas of
Thorstein Veblen. But whether the Bridges are confronting a
tornado that Walter refuses to let interrupt dinner, their
children's romantic and sexual hubbubs, a friend's suicide or
simply the long silences of their own relationship, there is
never any question about who is in charge around here.
</p>
<p> In the 1950s and '60s, when Evan S. Connell wrote the two
quiet, delicately crafted novels that are expertly and
faithfully conflated in Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, we had not yet
learned to call marriages of this kind "traditional," putting
a slight, sneering spin on the word. Just as this movie refuses
to impose a thrusting dramatic structure on a story that is all
incident, it also refuses to adopt anachronistic sociological
attitudes toward its people. It retains novelist Connell's tone--one of ironic compassion--and sustains as well the perfect
pitch of his voice, never going flat or sharp. That is to say
it neither falls into easy sentiment nor strains for cheap
satire. Instead it grants the Bridges the dignity that they--and most people of their time, place and (upper middle) class--worked so hard to achieve and that is usually denied them
in serious film and literature. In the process, it also grants
its two stars the freedom to explore the couple's humanity.
</p>
<p> They exercise it with delicious subtlety. Walter's children
and friends would be startled if they could hear him bellowing
Stouthearted Men in the privacy of his car. Or see him make a
sudden lurching grab for his wife in the privacy of their
bedroom one hot summer's day. These urges do not surprise him.
He is entirely aware of his secret life, and really quite
pleased with it. But that's his business and no one else's.
</p>
<p> India is less open to herself, but Woodward invests her with
sudden flashes of inarticulate understanding, a subtext of
suppressed intelligence, that makes her submissiveness all the
more poignant. Blythe Danner and Austin Pendleton in supporting
roles are touching in much the same way. But then, this memory
piece, shy in manner but tough in spirit, has brought out the
