The Bridges of Madison County is a 1995 American romantic drama based on the 1992 bestselling novel of the same name by Robert James Waller.

The Bridges of Madison County is set in 1965 and features Italian war bride Francesca Johnson (Meryl Streep), who lives with her husband and two children on their Iowa farm.

That year she meets National Geographic photojournalist Robert Kincaid (Clint Eastwood), who comes to Madison County, Iowa to photograph its historic covered bridges.

In the present, adult siblings Michael and Carolyn Johnson arrive at the Iowa farmhouse of their recently deceased mother, Francesca, to settle her estate.

They are shocked upon learning that Francesca requested to be cremated and her ashes scattered from Roseman Covered Bridge, rather than be buried next to her late husband, Richard.

There are also several National Geographic magazines, including one featuring Madison County's covered wooden bridges,[6] old cameras, a book, and other mementos.

Francesca, a WWII war bride originally from Bari, Italy, stays home while her husband and teenage son and daughter attend the state fair for the next four days.

Francesca details the intense affair and its lasting influence on her and Robert, hoping Michael and Carolyn will understand and honor her final request.

The site's consensus states: "Sentimental, slow, schmaltzy, and very satisfying, The Bridges of Madison County finds Clint Eastwood adapting a bestseller with heft, wit, and grace.

[12] Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade "A−" on scale of A+ to F.[13] According to Janet Maslin from The New York Times, "Clint Eastwood, director and alchemist, has transformed The Bridges of Madison County into something bearable—no, something even better.

Limited by the vapidity of this material while he trims its excesses with the requisite machete, Eastwood locates a moving, elegiac love story at the heart of Mr. Waller's self-congratulatory overkill.

Looking sturdy and voluptuous in her plain housedress (the year is 1965), she rises straight out of Christina's World to embody all the loneliness and fierce yearning Andrew Wyeth captured on canvas.

It is about the anticipation and consequences of passion—the slow dance of appraisal, of waiting to make a move that won't be rejected, of debating what to do when the erotic heat matures into love light.

Corliss concludes "The Bridges of Madison County is Eastwood's gift to women: to Francesca, to all the girls he's loved before—and to Streep, who alchemizes literary mawkishness into intelligent movie passion.