Classic Movie Review: The Stunning Boredom of Mr and Mrs Bridge

Mr and Mrs Bridge is a criminally boring 1990 drama about a couple in the 1940s dealing with a changing world that is leaving them behind. Mr and Mrs Bridge are played by real life, beloved Hollywood couple, Paul Newman and Joanna Woodward as two characters so astonishingly dull that I am shocked someone decided to make a movie about them. That this was based on a beloved novel by an award winning novelist isn't surprising as I will explain.

Dear reader, please know, I am not in any way disparaging author Evan S. Connell. While I have not read the two novels of his that were squeezed together to create this dreary star vehicle, I can imagine that the power of this particular story is wrenched to the page. There is a very literary quality to Mr and Mrs Bridge that serves as a magnifying glass for everything in this movie that does not work.

Mr and Mrs Bridge opens on very old footage that was evidently captured on one of the very first commercial cameras sold in stores. From intuition we can sense that this brief, wordless footage is that of Mrs Bridge playing by the pool with her very young children. We are never told this but it’s a reasonable inference. Why is this footage here? My guess is to show us that the Bridge family was always incredibly average even when the parents were relatively youthful.

The credits end, the camera footage seemed to last less than 10 seconds, further calling attention to the lack of necessity of this footage. The Bridges’ are now Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Mr Bridge is fussing with the barbecue dinner the maid is making for them, while Mrs Bridge lies in repose in a beach chair, discussing the heat and the sound of the locusts. That’s the scene. That’s it.

Now, in a movie, this scene is about as dull as it reads in my description. In a novel however, where the author is laying in colorful exposition about the characters or wittily describing the characters and setting of the story, this scene could perhaps be quite good. The scene illustrates the strong difference between novels and film. In film, when we aren’t relying on an author to make a scene colorful, we require something to elevate the mundane to the sublime. That never happens here.

Instead, two old people and their maid fuss over barbecue and talk about the weather. It’s like being a kid and being forcefully told to sit quietly and not bother your grandparents. If that’s your thing, cool, no one is here to kink shame, but it’s not my thing. I need a scene in a movie to function, it needs to do something. Be funny, pass along information that will be important later, DO SOMETHING MOVIE!

Sorry, I apologize for the outburst. I realize that I am coming off like some sugared up child who requires his media to be constantly explosive or colorful. That’s not the case. I am perfectly happy to allow a movie to find itself. But, dear reader, I have already watched the entirety of Mr. and Mrs Bridge and I waited patiently for these scenes to matter, to build to something, to reveal an interesting insight or truth about these characters and I can tell you, that never happens.

The rest of Mr and Mrs Bridge contains a series of the same same scenes wherein very little happens. The crux of the story is that Mrs Bridge feels the world has begun to pass her by and while she is troubled by this and wishes to change a little as well, Mr Bridge is rooted in place and refuses to let either of them change. This story is told via a lot of nothing happening. Things happen around the Bridge family but the central duo are rarely moved by anything.

The other characters in the movie appear like stars swimming against the astral pull of a pair of black holes eager to suck in all joy. Kyra Sedgwick plays one of the Bridge daughters and because everything around her is so bland, her broad and lively performance comes off as campy and exhausting. It’s like watching a stripper trying to liven up a corpse, it’s kind of creepy and no one wants to watch it.

I make this comparison because though I have described Mr Bridge as incredibly, remarkably dull, he does have one trait: he gets turned on by his daughter. Yeah, that’s a running through-line of this austere drama, dad is kind of incest-y toward his daughter. A scene in which Mr Bridge watches his daughter sunbathing leaves Mr Bridge so horny that he immediately has sex with Mrs Bridge.

It’s possible that this wasn’t the intent of the filmmakers but when you place the scene of him leering out the window, trying not to be seen while watching his daughter sunbathe, and then follow that scene with Mrs Bridge walking in and Mr Bridge is immediately D.T.F, the implication is almost unmistakable. Either they intended this or they are very bad at making movies and understanding how film language works.

Granted, this is as close to something happening in Mr and Mrs Bridge as the movie gets, but it’s not something that anyone should want to happen. In fact, I have to wonder why anyone thought that this was a good idea to include in this or any movie. In a movie this dull, livening things up should not include ‘my daughter made me horny so now I am having sex with my wife.’ I don’t care how boring your movie is, don’t do this.

Now, dear reader, I want you to imagine how nauseatingly boring Mr and Mrs Bridge must be for me to bury the lead that is dad Paul Newman’s lust for his teenage daughter. That Mr and Mrs Bridge manages to contain that scene and I am still more compelled to explain how dull the movie is, should tell you just how mind numbing this achingly wearisome this movie truly is. Paul Newman gets incesty toward Kyra Sedgwick and I was still so disinterested that I only remembered to tell you about it after I described the stultifying boredom that the rest of this movie brought about.

Mr and Mrs Bridge turned 30 years old this week, November 29th, 2020, and we are featuring this gem of early 90’s cinema in the next edition of the Everyone’s a Critic Movie Review Podcast wherein I cause my co-host Bob Zerull to be aghast by my description of this scene. You see, Bob was smart enough not to watch this ungodly awful movie. Dear reader, please remember what I go through for your entertainment.