The strength of Eastwood's Bridges is in its patience, and how it lets the love story develop from start to finish, even though the audience knows from the beginning the broad strokes of what's going to happen.

With Eastwood as Kincaid and Meryl Streep as Francesca, this carefully observant love story turns Waller's pop-lit passion into screen art.

Bridges is an admirable achievement, one that probably does more to reposition its maker as someone who can carry a movie without carrying a gun than as the director/star of a Love Story for the Loving Care set.

In as many ways as it is a romance, it’s also an interrogation of the social structures that the silent generation was held to, and still are held to in the collective imagination.