By Preston Wilder
The Cold War is literally cold for New York lawyer Jim Donovan (Tom Hanks). Walking through a wintry East Berlin on his way to the Soviet embassy, Jim gets mugged by a rather polite gang of youths who helpfully give him directions but also steal his overcoat – so he walks through the snow and nearly catches his death, spending the rest of the film coughing and sniffling. It’s a typical touch in Bridge of Spies, which takes pains to establish Donovan (a semi-public figure who actually stood for US Senator soon after the events depicted in the movie) as an ordinary guy, Joe American, an insurance lawyer with a wife and a house in the suburbs – only somehow caught up in a web of spies and skullduggery, even with his nose running.
The film divides into two halves, their common theme being Donovan’s decent, implicitly ‘American’ values vs. official cynicism. In the first half, he’s hired to defend Soviet spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance, getting to keep his British accent) – and insists on giving him a proper defence, a “fair shake” as per the Constitution, even as the justice system wants no more than a sham trial. In the second, he’s sent to Berlin (this is 1962, just after the Wall went up) to arrange a prisoner exchange between Abel and captured U-2 pilot Gary Powers – but insists on including another prisoner in the deal, a random American student named Frederic Pryor, because “every person matters”. Once again, the powers-that-be are indifferent but Jim – good old Jim Donovan – wants to do the right thing.
Steven Spielberg, who directed, is a master at this kind of smartly-spun uplift (the script is co-written by the Coen Brothers, whose own films are a lot less uplifting). Spielberg clichés are in evidence, from repeated phrases used for effect – “Would it help?” – to a heavenly choir intruding on the soundtrack more than once. The look is grandiose: white light pours out of windows in the daytime scenes, lamps throw a burnished-orange sheen in the night interiors. That said, the shots of drab, snow-shrouded post-war Berlin are magnificent (the production designer is the great Adam Stockhausen, who won an Oscar for The Grand Budapest Hotel) – and in fact the film is often irresistible, bouncing along for 141 minutes. When he’s trying to make serious points (as in Lincoln three years ago), Spielberg can be painfully naïve – but when he mostly wants to entertain, he’s extremely sophisticated.
There are flaws, to be sure. One problem, as in Lincoln, is that Jim isn’t a man of his time: he’s a 21st-century man, placed in a period setting to point out its foolishness. His son gets brainwashed with Cold War propaganda at school, but Jim’s having none of it: calm down, he tells the boy, “there won’t be any sirens” (would a middle-class dad in 1962 be so blithe about dismissing the official hysteria? I wonder). Then again, the film is happy to show Powers being tortured by the KGB without showing any CIA equivalent for Abel, which is mildly annoying – and Abel is a cool spy in general, getting all the best lines: “I’m not afraid to die, Mr. Donovan”. Beat. “Though it wouldn’t be my first choice…”
I watched Bridge of Spies with a mental courtroom going on in my head, rather like the courtroom where our hero argues for due process and American justice. ‘Yeah, right!’ yelled the prosecution as folksy Jim out-bluffs the Commies and shows off the wide-eyed idealism that’s made him such a highly successful corporate lawyer. ‘Oh shut up, it’s enjoyable,’ countered the defence – and it really is, from the back-room negotiations to the script’s delight in spy paraphernalia like a poison-pin in a dollar coin (“Spend the dollar!” spies are urged) or a secret message hidden in a park bench. The opening shot hints at more, juxtaposing three images of Abel as if to imply a message about the different faces we all have to wear – but it’s hard to sustain such a message when our hero (good old Jim Donovan) always wears the same face.
That’s the real message here, that Donovan’s values are the same in the first (domestic) half and the second (foreign) half; America needs to stay true to itself in order to succeed in the world, etc etc. Bridge of Spies is as serious as Lincoln, in its way, though Spielberg always goes for the crowd-pleasing option. “It doesn’t matter what people think,” Donovan tells Powers at the very end, and that should be the ending, that people think Donovan’s a traitor (he defended a Commie!) but in fact he’s a true patriot – but Spielberg can’t allow that to happen, so he adds a couple of scenes where Jim is finally appreciated. He’s mentioned on TV. His picture’s in the papers. His kids gaze in awe. A woman on the train smiles gratefully. Looks like even the Cold War can be warm and fuzzy.
DIRECTED BY Steven Spielberg
STARRING Tom Hanks, Mark Rylance, Alan Alda
US 2015 141 mins
