Bridge of Spies - Spielberg directing and Tom Hanks in top form.
If you are ignorant of these events, some spoilers follow here, so read up on the Cold War; this stuff is history and you should know the story already and most of the story is in the trailer anyway. This movie isn’t about not knowing what happened; it’s about just how intense these events really were. If you’re the least bit familiar with the late 50’s and early 60’s, you know about the darkest days of the Cold War and the various incidents that almost set civilization back to a radioactive version of the stone age. One of the most publicized of the events was the shooting down of an American U2 spy plane. For those that don’t know, at the time the US was ahead of the Soviet Union in technological spying, but the USSR usually bested the US in ground-level human spying. The U2 spy plane was a slow, ungainly, long winged aircraft that was designed to have near invulnerability by virtue of being able to fly higher than anything the Soviets could use to shoot it down. It took high resolution photographs from the near stratosphere, until, however, one WAS shot down, in 1960. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was supposed to detonate the plane and use a suicide device hidden in a coin to kill himself, so as to not be taken prisoner. Unfortunately for the US, Powers didn’t or couldn’t kill himself, was captured and put on trial for spying. Meantime, a Soviet spy, Rudolph Abel, captured in the US several years before, was rotting in jail.
Abel had escaped the death penalty in part due to his lawyer James Donovan and in part to put him “on ice” in case of the need to have someone to swap with the USSR in the future. Abel’s lawyer, Donovan, is the focus of Bridge of Spies. An insurance lawyer, Donovan was convinced to defend Abel back in 1957, in spite of venomous antipathy from many Americans who would have preferred that Abel be eaten by rabid jackals in a public square. In 1962, Donovan was called on again to negotiate a swap between the US and the USSR….Abel for Powers. This film tells the story of those two time spans, the Abel trial and the prisoner swap. Politicians on both sides wanted “their guy” back in order to lessen peripheral damage but could not be seen negotiating with each other, so unknown back channels were used, hence Donovan, being handled by the CIA. As we all know (or maybe not?), the swap was completed in 1962 and the prisoners were exchanged at the border between West and East Berlin. This was only a matter of months before the even more horrifying Cuban Missile Crisis, while the Berlin Wall was being constructed and while people from East Germany were routinely being shot dead in the streets, trying to escape the country.
One of the great skills of Spielberg as a director is his ability to have a movie that calmly tells a story, in a way that’s easy to understand and that brings things down to a personal level. That skill is quite evident in this story. Being told in several time periods, involving Cold War intrigue, the story could have been very complex, but ends up being quite easy, intended for an audience that might not know the horror of these events. None of the existential drama is lost. The grimness of that post WW II period of time in Germany is made visually and emotionally clear. By the time the movie is over, you feel relieved to just walk out of the theater without an imminent nuclear threat hanging over your head or uniformed goons waiting to cart you off to a prison camp.
Tom Hanks is really in his element in this story. He’s a lawyer, not a politician, has no real interest in dabbling in Cold War machinations, but he’s also a guy who considers it his duty to do the job when he’s called upon. Just why HIM, is no clearer in the movie than it is in real history, it’s like being hit on the head by a meteor, one of the breaks in life. Throughout the second half of the movie, Hanks portrays Donovan as a guy who is scared to death, having to cross into East Germany as people are being shot or sent to the Gulag, but also as a guy who never loses his wits and manages to bring off the swap.
This is a fairly straightforward history movie, done really well. The direction is good at every point and Tom Hanks excels. It’s mostly a one character movie, although Mark Rylance, who portrays Abel, is excellent in this supporting role. Other cast members are as good as they need to be but their roles don’t stand out like Hanks and Rylance. Visible effects are at a minimum; it’s mainly a dramatic movie, but the cold, gray awful-ness of the Berlin Wall and East Berlin in 1962 is really palpable. Bridge of Spies is well worth seeing, both as history and to see Hanks and Spielberg really pull out the stops. Don’t miss it.
