February 8, 1991 | Walter and India Bridge are among the rigorously proper residents of the extremely proper community of Kansas City. The times may be changing -- the complacent 1930s are drifting into the troublesome 1940s -- but Walter remains, as ever, a stickler for the time-tested virtues: hard work, industriousness, self-reliance, manliness. India may have a few doubts now and then, but she thinks it wise to keep them to herself.

It is the time and the place for restraint, for seemliness in one’s public behavior. Nothing is allowed to get out of hand, not even affection. When, suddenly, after long years of service, Walter’s spinsterish secretary confesses her long-cherished affection for her boss, Walter doesn’t know what to say -- he can’t say anything, really -- because, well, one simply doesn’t talk about such things, not even with people one knows.

And certainly not with people one doesn’t know. When India suggests, ever so tentatively, that she might benefit from seeing a psychiatrist, Walter frowns and harrumphs and quickly dismisses the idea. If she needs someone to talk to, he reasons, she can talk to him. And if she needs some cheering up, why, he’ll just buy her a car.

Walter is the sort of smug, small-town patriarch that satirists have loved to hate for decades. And, come to think of it, India, too, is the type of stereotype that has been held up for cheap mockery in books, movies and TV shows for more than a half-century. It says something about the intelligence, and the humanity, of the people who made Mr. and Mrs. Bridge that, throughout this leisurely-paced, episodic film based on two novels by Evan S. Connell, the title characters are not treated with a disdainful contempt. Instead, director James Ivory and scriptwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (A Room With a View) present a family portrait rendered in graceful brush strokes of bemused affection, insightful observation -- and, yes, gentle, but firm, social satire.

Paul Newman, who seems to be stretching himself as an actor ever more venturesomely as he ages, is extraordinarily fine as Mr. Bridge. He gives us the man in all his vainglory, all his short-sightedness -- and yet, somehow, also gives us a character of undeniable dignity and gravity. Bridge is a very successful lawyer and, apparently, a champion for the weak when he accepts pro bono cases. He is also a bigot, utterly shocked when his black maid announces that her nephew will attend Harvard. And, quite often, he is hilariously small-minded: When he and India visit Europe, he takes one look at the artists busy at their canvases at the Louvre, and sniffs: “Why don’t they get jobs like everyone else? And do their art on weekends? That’s how I’d handle it!”

Newman hints at a darker, meticulously repressed side of Bridge, suggesting that not everything he feels for Ruth (Kyra Sedgwick), his beautiful, wanna-be bohemian daughter, can be described as wholesome paternal affection. But that’s not the sort of weakness a man like Bridge would ever admit. Never. After all, this is a man who won’t even acknowledge the force of nature if that force is pitched against his own iron will. In the movie’s funniest sequence, Bridge insists on sitting out an approaching tornado in his country club’s dining room, even after all the other members have taken refuge in the basement. That is, almost all of the other members. India remains at her husband’s side because, well, maybe she fears her husband more than any force of nature.

Bridge turns out to be right, by the way. The tornado doesn’t damage the country club at all. It wouldn’t dare, not with Walter Bridge inside.
Joanne Woodward is every bit her real-life husband’s equal as India Bridge, playing the dutiful wife as a timidly loyal retainer for the king of the Bridge castle. Woodward is marvelously expressive in India’s moments of anxious incomprehension -- when she tries to understand why her best friend (Blythe Danner, who’s terrific) is slipping into madness (obviously, not every wife in Kansas City is completely satisfied with her lot), or when India turns out to be the only mother not kissed by her son during an Eagle Scout ceremony. Poor India: It doesn’t dawn on her that her boy, Douglas (Robert Sean Leonard), is every inch his father’s son. And surely his father wouldn’t kiss her in public, would he?