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‘Bridge of Spies’ Review

Cold War thriller from Steven Spielberg exists, has actors and a plot

Bridge of Spies
October 16, 2015

Bridge of Spies opens with a casually masterful display of filmmaking, introducing us to Soviet Spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) as he is tailed by the FBI and en route to picking up some bit of intel. The dialogue is minimal. The camerawork is precise, gliding so we can see Abel’s spy gear, tracking behind FBI Agent Blasco (Domenick Lombardozzi) as he follows Abel into and out of the subway, and letting us in on Abel’s secrets as he subtly destroys the only useful bit of intel in his hotel room as the flatfoots are wholly oblivious to what he is doing. It’s a handy reminder that Spielberg is still one of the best directors working.

I just wish he had more to work with here. Bridge of Spies is a bit overstuffed and full of itself, but it is competently made, a little exciting and a little funny and a little, well, little. There’s nothing particularly memorable about it, nothing particularly grand, but nothing particularly wrong, either. It is a movie that exists and that you may not regret having seen but likely won’t recall as one of the great cinematic experiences of your life and probably wouldn’t bother watching again when you happen to see it’s on cable.

Abel, tried and convicted in the press before he sets foot in court, is the most unpopular man in America. It’s a title James Donovan (Tom Hanks), an insurance attorney who previously worked with the Allies at the Nuremberg trials, knows he will share when he agrees to represent the spy. James and his bosses cynically say they must show the world that Abel will get a fair trial—unlike those dirty Commies would do for one of our men, you know—before wavering on that commitment when it looks like Abel might actually get off.

It gives Spielberg a chance to riff on good old-fashioned American liberalism. (The Constitution demands that we set free a foreign spy because if we don’t hew to technicalities invented by the Supreme Court, well, why even bother calling ourselves Americans, y’know?) Abel is to be traded for Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell), a U2 pilot who was captured after his airplane crashed over Soviet airspace.

But neither the United States nor the Soviet Union really wants to acknowledge that such a trade will take place, putting Donovan in an awkward position. Complicating matters further is the fact that the East Germans have captured an American student caught on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall after it went up and are desperate to make an official deal, a bilateral arrangement, a handshake between two powers on the world stage. They are tired of being seen as Soviet stooges, puppets for a communist dictatorship. They want respect! And they’re willing to use a scared, 20-something grad student to get it, as all great powers do.

It sometimes feels as if there are two different movies here—a courtroom drama on the one hand, and a cold war thriller/comedy of errors on the other—that have been awkwardly smashed together. It’s a feeling only compounded by the film’s nearly two-and-a-half hour running time. The second half, set in Berlin, provides some darkly comic moments about the vagaries of bureaucracy that one imagines must have come courtesy of Joel and Ethan Coen, who are credited on the screenplay alongside Matt Charman.

The film is shot by Janusz Kaminski (who worked as the director of photography for Spielberg on Schindler’s List, Munich, and a number of other films) in Spielberg’s preferred style of Hazy Historical. It sometimes feels as though the lens has been smeared with Vaseline in order to create the softness, to diffuse the bleary lights in the background. After the film was over I asked my seatmate if the projector might have been slightly out of focus, the picture was so smudgy.

As is usually the case, Spielberg has assembled a first-class crop of acting talent. Hanks plays an everyman with his normal aplomb, while Rylance’s spy is quite clever. Amy Ryan, Alan Alda, and Jesse Plemons are welcome presences, if underutilized. If only their talents were put to a project worthy of their skills.

Published under: Movie Reviews