Movie Review: Bridge of Spies

It’s been a while since there has been a good, cracking Cold War thriller.  The Wikipedia entry on Cold War films lists 189 movies, and none of them strike me as being of recent vintage.  The 2005 film Good Night and Good Luck and the 1993 film Matinee were about Cold War paranoia, but that was on the home front, not the Berlin Wall.  The 1960’s produced classics like The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and Funeral in Berlin, but except for the recent remake of John LeCarre’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy it has been a long time since we’ve had a film featuring anything close to a clandestine meeting at Checkpoint Charlie.

Steven Spielberg takes us back to the height (or depth) of the Cold War in Bridge of Spies, a far, far too pretentious title for a film that forgoes Cold War posturing in favor of a personal story about one man’s tiny contribution to humanity in the middle of the struggle over the fate of mankind.  As the paragon of decency in a story of covert agencies, Tom Hanks further cements his station as the keeper of Jimmy Stewart’s flame.

The story is a familiar one to anyone over a certain age but is perhaps a dim portion of history to Millennials: in the early 1960’s a US spy plane is shot down over Russia, and the powers decide to execute an exchange between the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, and a convicted Soviet spy in US prison.  The Soviet spy, Rudolph Abel (Mark Rylander) looks more like an accountant than a spy, but maybe that’s what made him effective.  At his trial he is reluctantly but ably defended by insurance attorney James Donovan (Hanks) who is one of those attorneys who believes in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and everything else the FBI and CIA find inconvenient. After Abel is summarily convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison, Donovan is then requested by the US government to negotiate the exchange. 

The negotiations are complicated by a number of factors.  At the time the US Government did not recognize East Germany as a sovereign nation, which is where the negotiations had to take place.  The Berlin Wall was in the process of being built, making travel to East Berlin difficult.  The Soviets refused to acknowledge they had any influence over East Germany, and the East Germans denied that they were under Soviet rule.  And a very stupid US economics student got stuck on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall as it went up, giving the East German authorities an extra pawn in the game.

Hanks portrays Donovan as a man who unflaggingly believes that civility and decency will be of help to him, even as it is repeatedly shown not to be (those qualities were also of no use at Abel’s trial).  Donovan has to be the one honest man in a negotiation where no one even agrees on the rules, much less gives any thought to obeying them.

That Hanks is brilliant goes without saying; he is one of the most reliable actors working, in addition to being one of the best.  The fact that he won back-to-back Oscars for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump probably means he’d have to lose an arm to win another, but few actors can convey what is going on inside their character’s head better than Hanks.  Donovan knows he is being lied to by the Soviets, the East Germans, and the Americans, a fact that is clear to the audience but Donovan plausibly hides from his negotiating partners.

The script, co-credited to Joel and Ethan Coen, displays more subtlety than is usually associated with a Coen Brothers movie.  Seemingly irrelevant dialog from early in the movie later comes back during Donovan’s pleas to consummate a deal.  When his innate decency fails, Donovan resorts to cunning and a well-honed ability to read people, allowing him deftly navigate the mine field he put himself into.

If one wanted to criticize Spielberg’s direction, I suppose one could point out that at this point in his career he seems to have one gear, that he invests Bridge of Spies with the same momentousness that he displayed in a sweeping historical drama like Lincoln.  That film was about the passage of the 14^th amendment and an end to slavery in America; Bridge of Spies is about one American trying to do something just and decent (there is that word again) for three people.  But Spielberg is the greatest living director, possibly the greatest film director ever, and his mastery of the medium is still evident even if it is somewhat familiar at this point.

Bridge of Spies is what you would expect of a Steven Spielberg film starring Tom Hanks about the Cold War: immaculately produced, evocatively acted, and directed with subtlety and grace.  The combination of Spielberg and Hanks is a far more reliable sign of excellence than a comic book imprimatur or the CGI budget of a summer blockbuster.