Bridge of Spies | Little White Lies

Bridge of Spies

24 Nov 2015 / Released: 26 Nov 2015

Words by David Ehrlich

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Starring Amy Ryan, Mark Rylance, and Tom Hanks

Man holding umbrella in heavy rain, illuminated by bright light
Man holding umbrella in heavy rain, illuminated by bright light
4

Anticipation.

A new Spielberg film is always cause for celebration, but his last Tom Hanks joint was The Terminal.

4

Enjoyment.

Part spy story, part chamber piece, all gripping.

4

In Retrospect.

As a Cold War film, it’s strong. As a window into Spielberg’s mind, it’s essential.

A Cold War spy thriller from Steven Spiel­berg that’s as sleek, robust and allur­ing as a vin­tage Rolls Royce.

If dad­dy issues were the uni­fy­ing motif of Steven Spielberg’s ear­ly films, his lat­er work has been defined by an obses­sive pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with the val­ue of a sin­gle human life, the peer­less pop­ulist grey­ing into a more philo­soph­i­cal matrix of concerns.

How many sol­diers are worth putting in harm’s way in order to save Matt Damon? How many mur­dered Olympians are worth decades of esca­lat­ing reprisals? How many Jews can a gold ring buy from the Nazis? Who­ev­er saves one life saves the world entire,” Itzhak Stern tells Oskar Schindler, that Tal­mu­dic max­im serv­ing as the most explic­it indi­ca­tion that Spiel­berg isn’t just the people’s cham­pi­on, but also God’s accountant.

Bridge of Spies once again finds Spiel­berg try­ing to bal­ance the scales, this delight­ful dad movie clar­i­fy­ing that the direc­tor isn’t try­ing to deter­mine the val­ue of a human life, but restore it. It’s a warm look at the Cold War that uses Janusz Kaminski’s beloved flood­lights to illu­mi­nate a foot­note of Amer­i­can his­to­ry, the film begins in New York cir­ca 1957, where an unlike­ly bond was forged between a New York insur­ance lawyer and the Russ­ian spy he was hired to defend in court.

An elec­tric open­ing chase sequence intro­duces Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance, endear­ing), a soft-spo­ken Irish­man whose orders come from behind the Iron Cur­tain. Fol­low­ing Abel’s cap­ture, the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment decides that a fair tri­al would be good PR, and they know just the guy to argue his side and roll over at the inevitable ver­dict. Enter fam­i­ly man James Dono­van (Tom Han­ks, decen­cy rubbed into every fold of his Shar Pei face), who piss­es off his entire coun­try by treat­ing Abel’s case with the same care he would any other.

From there, the film morphs from court­room dra­ma to espi­onage thriller as Dono­van finds him­self fly­ing to Berlin in order to secret­ly nego­ti­ate a pris­on­er exchange with the Rus­sians: they’ll get Abel, and the US will receive recent­ly downed U‑2 pilot Fran­cis Gary Pow­ers in return. At Donovan’s insis­tence, the deal even­tu­al­ly thick­ens to include an Amer­i­can exchange stu­dent who’s impris­oned with­out cause while try­ing to flee East Ger­many before it’s sealed off.

Script­ed by Matt Char­man and glazed with a (spo­rad­i­cal­ly evi­dent) rewrite by the Coen broth­ers, this gen­teel saga of moral equiv­a­lence, told through a series of rich back­ground nego­ti­a­tions, is sus­tained by its con­vic­tion that wars are waged between gov­ern­ments and not peo­ple. Dono­van, played by the ulti­mate every­man and sad­dled with a run­ny nose just to under­score his plain­ness, is a man like any oth­er. Stand­ing next to the Berlin Wall, its cement still wet, Donovan’s sen­si­ble civil­ian nature dis­tances the arti­fi­cial bor­der from his­tor­i­cal fact and restores it to the realm of madness.

Three men in suits seated at a table, looking serious.

Bridge of Spies may not be anyone’s favourite Spiel­berg movie – his inevitable slide towards mawk­ish­ness is more frus­trat­ing here than usu­al, and a pro­tract­ed final scene stum­bles as it tries to squeeze in a mess of con­tra­dic­to­ry ideas – but it’s still greased with a master’s touch, and few spy movies have ever been so enjoy­ably deter­mined to see through all that cloak-and-dag­ger bullshit.

The val­ue of a life, Dono­van affirms for his direc­tor, is equal to that of one’s own. And in the process of mak­ing that argu­ment, he typ­i­fies anoth­er grad­ual change in Spielberg’s films: once he told sto­ries about ordi­nary men being con­front­ed with extra­or­di­nary things – now his ordi­nary men cre­ate those extra­or­di­nary things for them­selves. It’s the dif­fer­ence between climb­ing aboard an alien space­ship and pass­ing an amend­ment that restores human rights to an entire race of peo­ple. Call it the banal­i­ty of goodness.

You might like