My Little Eye
"Those who get their history from movies are doomed to forget it."
--Ulysses S. Grant
I don’t often talk in-depth about movies immediately after seeing them, but in the case of Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, I went straight from the auditorium to a lounge and recorded an episode of the KtS Podcast.* As someone for whom Spielberg had long since fallen off the Must-See radar, this Cold War drama surprised and delighted me in ways I hadn't expected. But the afterglow was subtle, and I grappled on air with the nagging feeling that Bridge is not a great movie—better than good, surely, but just short of memorable.
More than a week later, as I finally sit down to write about the film (and not having since listened to the recording), I must also grapple with being a terrible student of history. Had I a firmer grasp on world events, perhaps the details of screenwriter Matt Charman and Joel and Ethan Coen's complicated, continent-crossing spy game would have resonated. Instead, I'm left only with impressions of themes, memories of a solidly gooey performance from Tom Hanks, and the sense that Bridge of Spies, like Full Metal Jacket, is two movies jammed just a tad too forcefully into one celluloid skin.
Hanks plays James B. Donovan, a New York insurance attorney unofficially recruited by the CIA to defend a suspected Russian spy named Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance). The year is 1957, and America is in full-blown Red Scare mode. Donovan's young son (Noah Schnapp) fills the bathtub with water as a drill for an impending nuclear disaster; commuters on the train eye Donovan with disdain when they recognize the dirty-commie's lawyer riding with them. Everyone, it seems, is aligned against him: his wife (Amy Ryan) fears for her family's safety in a neighborhood of paranoid patriots; the CIA pokes him for insider info during the case; his client, Abel, quietly refuses to be a courtroom caricature—instead choosing to cooperate for the duration of the trial and present himself as a thoughtful soldier accepting the consequences of his mission.
Abel’s capture and defense comprise the film’s first third. You should know that going in, especially if you haven’t paid attention to Bridge of Spies’ trailer or the true story on which the film is based (I’m guilty on both counts). With a keen eye to craftsmanship and theme, Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski build a fascinating portrait of an aged spy who’s decades-long displacement from his homeland has left him with nothing but Bond-henchman tasks (such as intercepting hollow coins with coded messages inside) and lots of quiet time to paint remarkable oil portraits and landscapes. Abel doesn’t speak a lot, but Rylance conveys so much dignity and regret in his storied face that our imaginations and empathy fill in the gaps.
For his part, Donovan is Clark Kent, if he were a mild-mannered lawyer rather than a reporter. A true creature of conscience, he always does the right thing—or as right a thing as the situation will allow. He believes in the Constitution, and all the protections it demands, even when standing up for an unrepentant saboteur. Though his country despises him, Donovan insists on treating Abel as fairly as possible because, as we soon see, America has agents abroad, too, and their conditions during capture hinge (to a great degree) on the example we set.
We cut between Donovan and Abel to the recruitment of a handful of pilots into the CIA. Their mission is to fly top-secret planes 70,000 feet over Russia and take surveillance photos using state-of-the-art, high-powered cameras. In a truly spectacular scene, one of the pilots, Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell), is shot down over enemy territory. As Abel’s trial comes to a close, Powers’ imprisonment and subsequent trial shifts the film’s focus to the titular trade of personnel on Germany’s Glienicke Bridge.
To his credit, Spielberg captures the whirlwind sensation of Donovan’s new new role as negotiator in the Abel/Powers swap. Bridge of Spies snaps from a brisk but pensive look at perception and core values into a stranger-in-a-strange-land picture. Donovan spends the last two-thirds of the film in East Berlin, navigating a sea of lawyers, officials, and agents of dubious affiliation—all without an American safety net (plausible deniability and all that). Complicating matters is the capture of an American student named Frederick Pryor (Will Rogers), who got caught on the wrong side of the newly constructed Berlin Wall. Donovan takes it upon himself to play all sides against one another in adding Pryor to the clandestine prisoner exchange.
This second movie contains a lot of “business” and supports the filmmakers’ themes just fine. But it contains little of the momentum and soapboxing righteousness that made Abel’s story so intriguing. The writers keep Bridge of Spies’ iffy middle section afloat with a regular flow of unexpected humor, mostly delivered by Hanks, whose warmth and earnestness place him in the pantheon of optimistic Spielberg do-gooders. He is Elliott in E.T.; he is Brody in Jaws; he is Indiana Jones, minus the whip. But there’s something a tad Die Hard 2 about Bridge of Spies, a piling on of situations and a collapsing of real-life timelines that amount to a bogging down of Donovan’s improbable adventures abroad. I definitely need to (and want to) see this film again, in order to understand where, exactly, my frustrations lie. Will I appreciate all the double- and triple-agent intrigue, knowing where everything leads—or will it still prove to be superfluous filler in a story that would have been better told in two distinct parts?**
I wholeheartedly recommend Bridge of Spies, despite my personal issues with the pacing. This film offers a stark contrast to The Martian, another recent stranded-man story. It’s a grown-up take on what it means to unite around an idea, even when that idea is inconvenient. In Ridley Scott’s sci-fi crowd-pleaser, the entire world rallies to support the safe return of an American astronaut. It’s a dimension-free, Michael Bay fantasy that holds no stakes and no relation to reality.
Bridge of Spies holds up a harsh mirror to our professed American values, asking us to rally behind a man whose guiding principles are derived from the document we profess to accept as our badge of national identity—but which we are collectively willing to throw under the bus whenever we’re asked to extend its protections to people or ideas we find distasteful. From the Cold War to the War on Terror, we must constantly and honestly evaluate our reverence (or lack thereof) towards human dignity, including our attitudes towards the hypocrisy of national policy (both foreign and domestic), and the blind obeisance to the fickle media that covers it.
Look no further than Bridge of Spies' thematic bookends of Donovan’s journey from hated to hero: those sour-faced commuters I mentioned earlier changed their tune on a dime, once their newspapers told them that Donovan had helped return Powers and Pryor to American soil. Beneath the feel-good blockbuster satisfaction of this penultimate scene are heavier questions about why those average Americans believed what they believed, and why they were so easily swayed by headlines. These are not quaint period-piece notions of a less-enlightened past, but contemporary (and perhaps timeless) velvet-wrapped boulders of conscience.
*Coming soon.
**Bridge of Spies Cinematic Universe, anyone?