This film replayed on Australian TV last night, and I watched it again because it came up quite recently in conversation. This was a conversation in feminist company, and I offered Madison County as one example of a film which is better than the book. (So often it’s the other way around.) The reaction I got was one of mild horror; this film is perhaps in popular memory terrible, like so many others that are similar in tone. Coincidentally, the protagonist Robert Kincaid shares a homophonous name with a rather kitsch American artist, and I wonder if this doesn’t help any.
WILL THIS FILM ANNOY A FEMINIST?
Possibly. If you’ve watched a lot of films in which a woman mopes about, basing her entire life around that of a man (in this case two men), sacrificing everything for her children, then you may well be in need of some escapist fantasy in which women bust out of traditionally feminine roles. Or perhaps you’d better appreciate a film about a woman who in real history did use her life for the betterment of humankind, outside producing offspring and being a good housewife. And that’s okay.
But stories about women who do spend their entire lives in the roles that were set up for them by their cultures are just as relevant. To criticise Francesca is like criticising Elizabeth Bennett who, like the protagonist of this story, makes the best of her situation, which happens to hinge upon her relationship with a more worldly, older man (men).This movie knows what it is questioning. This is evident in the dialogue, and it is even evident in the intratext: As Francesca leaves her house for the first time with Robert, we see the letterbox of ‘Mr and Mrs Richard Johnson’. Francesca has been completely subsumed by her husband to the point where she no longer has her own name. By 1995 women were starting to keep their own names in large numbers, refusing to go by Mrs [Husband's Name], so this glimpse of the letterbox was no accident.
The feminist aspect of this story comes through equally strongly in the wrapper story, in which Francesca’s grown children — a son and a daughter — deal with her posthumous wishes to have her ashes scattered from a local bridge rather than buried beside their father in the family plot. As the children read through Francesca’s diaries and letters addressed to them, the daughter quickly understands that there was more to her mother than met the eye. The son takes longer to understand, and is reminded by the daughter that it’s possible to both be a good wife and mother while at the same time being a fully-rounded human being. The son eventually realises that even though as the only boy he felt like a ‘prince’, and for that reason believed that as long as he was in existence his mother shouldn’t need anyone else, that this isn’t actually the case for women. We get a glimpse of how this new-found understanding is about to improve his own marriage for the better.
DOES IT PASS THE BECHDEL TEST?
There are problems with the Bechdel test, which was never meant to be the definitive test for feminism in movies anyhow. This film is a classic example of the test’s limitations in that we never do see two women talking to one another about something other than a man. But it is revealed in epistolary voice-over at the end of the film that Francesca became firm friends with another woman in the town. What drew the two women together was their shared marital infidelities, even though Francesca didn’t reveal anything about her four days with Robert Kincaid until years after he had departed. This suggests that the two women did indeed talk to each other about something other than a man, even if it were their extra-marital relationships with men which initially drew them together.
BUT IS IT ANY GOOD?
Stephen King, in his book On Writing, (rather cruelly, perhaps) lists this book as an example of terrible writing. With that sort of recommendation I picked it up one time to see what he was talking about, and I have to admit King was right; I don’t think I’ve read anything so terrible out of a mainstream publisher. The prose would sound off to all but the most tone-deaf of readers. On the other hand, even more startling is the fact that someone (presumably a group of people, with money) read that terrible book and thought, ‘Well, that’d make a great movie.’
It’s amazing what two good actors can do to redeem what, in the book, reads as bad dialogue. Props to the guy who adapted the script, also. And isn’t it interesting that this film was written by a man, adapted by a man and produced by a man (Clint Eastwood). I’m not sure what this says, exactly, except that it is possible for men to know what it feels like to be a woman such as Francesca.
For someone unfamiliar with the sleepy summer atmosphere of a farming town in Iowa, the setting is quite exotic, with the sparse dialogue allowing for the full orchestra of summer insects in the background. I love the sound of the storm outside, even if I am aware of the pathetic fallacy of turgid emotions.
I have a low tolerance for sap, and possibly a high tolerance for the erotics of abstinence — after all, the relationship between Francesca and Robert takes place mostly by correspondence after a single weekend together. Even for those who never experience a four-day love affair which affects them for the rest of their lives, it’s common to remember the earliest, heady phases of a romance, and that’s what makes this film resonant.
