by Brendan Foley
The studio worked really, really hard to sell the idea of Bridge of Spies as a nerve-biting spy thriller. But that’s really, really not the film that either Steven Spielberg or Tom Hanks set out to make. They have instead fashioned a true-life historical controversy into a parable about the need for decency and diplomacy in the most fraught of situations, a desperate call for decency and empathy in the midst of an ever darkening moral landscape.
But they did it in, you know, a fun way.
Bridge of Spies, new on Blu-ray and DVD, kicks off with the 1957 arrest of Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance, quietly mesmerizing) for espionage. With an entire nation calling for the spy’s head, James Donovan (Tom Hanks), an insurance lawyer, is reluctantly forced to take up the man’s defense. When he’s given the job, everyone tells him what a patriotic duty it is, to show that America’s ideals of justice are preserved even when dealing with our then-greatest enemy.
But no one could have predicted how seriously Donovan takes the job, or how dogged a lobbyist he proves to be. Everyone else thinks this is just a dog-and-pony act, but Donovan starts seriously working to free his client, even when it turns his friends and family against him. It gets so bad that when someone shoots up the Donovan household, the investigating cops get mad at HIM.
Things take a more global turn when Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell) is shot down over Russia while flying a top secret U2 spy-plane. Donovan is once again pressed into service, sent to a recently-divided Berlin to negotiate the terms of an exchange, spy for spy. Neither government can be seen to acknowledge the espionage, so Donovan has to navigate a world of misdirects where everyone is wearing a different face and saying something other than they mean. And to make matters even more complicated, Donovan learns that there’s another American being held in Berlin, one that the US government has no incentive to barter for. But Donovan can’t let it go and his stubborn determination leads two nuclear global superpowers closer and closer to an international incident.
I have little doubt that, had he wanted to, Steven Spielberg could have made a thrilling and chilling spy game with this material. He’s Steven goddamn Spielberg. Thrills and chills are sort of a specialty. Instead Spielberg (armed with a script by the Coen Brothers and Matt Charman) focuses on the quiet tension, on the intimate moments of negotiation and dealing that steered these ships around the icebergs. Bridge of Spies could almost be a play, seeing as it takes place in an endless succession of board rooms and office spaces, each one inhabited by a different figure of nebulous morality and position, each one a new opponent for Donovan to size up and try to parse out. Save for some overly-booming Thomas Newman cues on the score, Bridge of Spies is a quiet movie, suffused with winter chill that casts a pall over the proceedings. Even when Donovan remarks that it is hot outside, that supposed warmth never breaks the hush.
At first that hush threw me off. It seemed like Spielberg was messing with the pace of his story to pay overlong attention to the micro-details. But as the film wore on, it became apparent that those micro-details are not a distraction to the story, they are the story. Donovan finds himself in a world of false faces, where every word in every sentence has been carefully calculated and considered, and he has to learn how to listen to that language and speak it in turn. As such, while the film’s dialogue doesn’t have the giddy electric rush you normally get with the Coens, it is no less precise than what you would expect from one of their masterpieces.
Tom Hanks is probably the only actor alive who could have played this role. Anyone else, and Donovan is either a blank or a naïve fool. Tom Hanks, by virtue of being Tom Hanks, is a man who we instantly understand and appreciate as a paragon of decency, and he makes that obstinate refusal to back away from the moral high ground, which could be cartoonish do-gooder-ism, seem believable, which of course makes it all the more heroic.
I thought a lot about the idea of heroism while watching this movie, and about patriotism. Spielberg defined a certain ideal of heroic/patriotic conduct in Saving Private Ryan, a movie that wagged a blood-soaked finger at modern audiences and demanded that they “Earn This.” But Bridge of Spies engages with those ideas at a deeper level, digging beneath the rhetoric of Old Glory waving on a graveyard wind, and actually asks questions about what it is that people kill and die for when they talk about country.
Donovan gets that thrown in his face over and over throughout the film, people demanding to know how he could turn his back on his country to defend this foreign enemy. But that’s the whole point of America, isn’t it? Didn’t so many people argue and fight and die to build and protect a place where everyone, everyone, is giving equal rights and protection under the law? Those people in the courtroom scenes screaming for Abel to be killed, they think they’re defending America, but they’re actually pissing on the ideas this country was founded on, so afraid of losing their country that they forgot what that country is supposed to be.
It’s easy to be afraid, of course, and Spielberg beautifully illustrates just what a parasite paranoia is, and just how insidiously that fear was bred into the young and vulnerable during the height of the Cold War. But even amidst that turmoil, Spielberg argues that there is still such a thing as black-and-white, good-and-bad morality.
In modern culture we have gotten used to the idea of moral ambiguity, to the idea that there are only shades of grey when dealing with such complex issues. But Spielberg uses Donovan and his intellectual heroism as a counterpoint to that, arguing that no, even on the darkest of days there is still right, and there is still wrong, and that it is an act of tremendous courage to stand by those ideals.
I don’t know how often I’ll revisit Bridge of Spies compared to other Spielberg films, but it’s a testament to how consistent he is that a work this major could be considered minor in his overall filmography. Bridge of Spies doesn’t need big fireworks or tricks to remind you that it is the work of a master, but instead displays that mastery in tiny gestures of accumulating power that gradually left me in tears.
Bridge Of Spies is now available on Blu-ray and DVD from Walt Disney Studios
