Bridge of Spies, directed by Steven Spielberg.
If nothing else, Steven Spielberg’s latest movie reminds us all that far too often American politics and cultural attitudes depend on the exploitation of fear. Back in the 1950s, politicians incessantly mined the possibility of nuclear war with the Soviet Union for popularity and support, accusing almost any entity they could imagine, including the United States Army, the State Department, and artists of all kinds (with a special emphasis on performing arts) of sympathy for Communism; the Congress formed committees to investigate people they called fellow travelers, pinkos, and “card carrying members of the Communist Party.” (Some may recall that in his campaign against Michael Dukakis, George H.W. Bush in an attempt to revive old-school anti-Communism, called his opponent a “card carrying member of the ACLU.”) Named after its chief practitioner, the false accusations, hysterical bullying, and demagoguery came to be known as McCarthyism; sadly, it succeeded, destroying careers and lives, intimidating scores of institutions, and electing a gaggle of politicians, not the least of them Richard Nixon.
Spielberg chooses an important but probably mostly forgotten incident from the Cold War to illustrate some of the tensions of the time. Bridge of Spies dramatizes the back-and-forth of espionage and counterespionage in the days when the government was, as they said, finding Reds under every bed. The movie opens with the FBI’s arrest, after its customary bungling, of Colonel Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), the highest ranking Soviet spy ever discovered working in the United States. Abel’s arrest triggers the major plot, introducing James Donovan (Tom Hanks), the lawyer assigned to defend him against the charge of espionage.
Although not entirely happy with the task, Donovan, a successful insurance attorney who has not practiced in a courtroom for years, performs the job as well as he can, even arguing, unsuccessfully, before the Supreme Court. In defending Abel, despite pressure from his wife, ostracism by his firm, and even attacks on his family, Donovan conducts the case to the best of his ability; in the process he comes to like and even admire Abel, a man of great strength and a genuine sense of honor. Considering himself a loyal soldier for his country, Abel refuses to cut a deal with the prosecution and tolerates his confinement with stoic courage.
In a parallel story that ultimately and dramatically intersects with the case, the movie shows the training and launching of the notorious U2 program of secret spy flights over the Soviet Union, which exploded into public knowledge with the shooting down of a plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers, played in the movie by Austin Stowell. Bridge of Spies reaches a kind of climax when, after dealing with both German and Soviet recalcitrance, Donovan manages to work out an exchange of prisoners, Abel for Powers, on the bridge of the title. James Donovan’s sharp dealing, his skill at negotiating, foreshadowed in a scene with a rival insurance lawyer, achieves an outcome that no one believed could succeed.
While capturing in documentary style some of the fear mongering of the time, the director dramatizes some incidents in the course of Donovan’s work. He shows the hasty construction of the Berlin Wall occurring in the cold and snow of November, just as Donovan desperately tries to enter East Germany; in reality, the Wall went up in August of 1961, with little chance of snow. He also only briefly alludes to Donovan’s work at the Nuremberg trials and never mentions his wartime service with the O.S.S. To maintain suspense in a story whose conclusion is known, no small feat, he intercuts between the training of the U2 pilots, Donovan’s efforts to help his client, the striking differences between East and West Berlin, and even the various prisons that come to serve as a metaphor in the film. Rudolf Abel languishes at Fort Leavenworth; after a show trial, Powers is condemned to ten years in a Russian prison; an unlucky American graduate student, Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers) finds himself on the wrong side of the Wall and, accused of espionage, spends time in an East German prison; and Donovan himself, set up by a German lawyer, is arrested and temporarily jailed by the East Berlin police.
The dialectic of that construction and Spielberg’s skillful manipulation of his material keeps the film in a constant tension, a taut wire never loosened, a sharp edge never blunted by the actuality of history. Its relatively low key style, rather unusual for a director known for blockbusters, shows, with some irony and even some humor, the courage, commitment, and skill of a relative amateur, who consistently outwits the opposition and outthinks all his allies in the CIA.
The two principal actors also deserve a great deal of credit for participating in an authenticity of character that meshes appropriately with the movie’s sense of time and place as well as its low-key approach to its subject. As the reluctant defense attorney who grows to like and admire his client, Tom Hanks works with conviction and a wry sense of humor, showing hints of an irony he’s displayed in some of his comic roles in the past. The real triumph of the film’s acting, however, belongs to Mark Rylance, who displays an almost uncanny minimalism in his performance as Colonel Abel. With very few words, a narrow range of facial expressions, a limited array of gestures, he somehow conveys a remarkable variety of emotions, constructing a really quite admirable personality that, in their several scenes together, entirely steals the picture from Hanks. Just like the character he portrays, he remains a mystery, but also engages the sympathy of the audience, not the hated Commie spy, but a man of honor and courage according to his own principles and beliefs.
For recalling an important incident from a dark time and telling the story with objectivity and entirely without prejudice, Spielberg deserves a good deal of credit. In showing the courage of two different men from two different backgrounds, Bridge of Spies shows how well a movie can work, with all its elements—acting, cinematography, plotting, and construction—functioning together. Though different from many of his previous productions, Bridge of Spies demonstrates all over again his skill as a cinematic storyteller.
