Bridge of Spies
Steven Spielberg (2015)
The Cold War drama Bridge of Spies, based on actual events, begins in 1957. The pivotal character, James B Donovan, is a partner in a New York law firm and a specialist in insurance settlements. In his early days as a lawyer, he was assistant to the chief US prosecutor at the Nuremberg war trials. When a man called Rudolf Abel is arrested in Brooklyn and prosecuted for espionage as a KGB agent, Donovan is approached to defend him. The American government, while it wants Abel convicted, is also anxious to ensure the appearance of a fair trial in order to limit the Soviets’ opportunities to use it for propaganda purposes. Although Donovan takes on the assignment reluctantly, professional and moral conscience compels him to defend Abel as strongly as possible. Donovan’s attempts to secure an acquittal are seen by many Americans as tantamount to treason: he and his family find themselves on the receiving end of hate mail and worse. Abel is duly found guilty but Donovan convinces the judge to give Abel a lengthy prison term rather than a death sentence. Part of Donovan’s argument to the judge is that Abel may one day prove useful as a bargaining tool with the USSR – in the event, that is, of a high-profile case of an American being charged with espionage on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Donovan is vindicated when, within a very few years, two potential exchange candidates have emerged. In 1960, the US pilot (Francis) Gary Powers, on a U2 plane sortie over the Soviet Union, is shot down and captured. When the Berlin Wall is erected, in August the following year, Frederic Pryor, an American graduate student, is arrested by border guards after trying to get his East German girlfriend into West Berlin. Jim Donovan becomes involved in negotiations on behalf of the CIA. He’s instructed to negotiate Gary Powers’s release in exchange for Rudolf Abel – Powers is a bigger deal politically – but Donovan insists on a two-for-one swap and eventually succeeds. In virtually simultaneous operations, Frederic Pryor is handed over to the US authorities at Checkpoint Charlie; Powers and Abel are exchanged on the Glienicke Bridge, which gives the film its less than inspired title.
This account of dealings between chalk-and-cheese political systems also involves the collaboration of two very different film-making sensibilities: Steven Spielberg directs from a screenplay for which the Coen brothers share a credit. Matt Charman’s name appears before the Coens and it may not do to overstate their contribution. Even so, it’s hard to ignore a tension here – an interesting one – between a script with some taut, tart dialogue and direction that cleaves to a more traditional, even square treatment. There are real pleasures to be had from Spielberg’s approach and Bridge of Spies, although it’s too long, is high-quality entertainment. The clarity of the storytelling and the audibility of the actors are very welcome. As usual, Janusz Kaminski’s lighting is expert (even if the backlighting of images is overdone) and Michael Kahn’s editing fluently precise. The first twenty minutes or so – which focus almost exclusively on Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) and his arrest by the FBI – are particularly good. The opening shot comprises three Abels in a single frame: the man himself; his image in a mirror; and a self-portrait that Abel is painting. Anthony Lane in the New Yorker describes this as ‘not just a dazzling composition with which to kick off a movie but a formal introduction to the world of espionage – a haven for multiple identities’. Lane isn’t wrong: the composition, if you have any advance knowledge of the film’s story, is quite an obvious one but nonetheless apt. It’s also an immediate reminder that we’re in safe, vastly experienced directorial hands. The FBI men’s pursuit of Abel on the New York subway, before they burst into his rented room to arrest him, is very well staged and, as a result, bracing to watch.
The enjoyment continues when Jim Donovan (Tom Hanks) enters the picture, in spite of early signs here that the film will avoid exploring tensions that might hinder the narrative. Donovan’s wife Mary (Amy Ryan), once she’s made clear that and why she’s opposed to her husband’s taking on Abel’s case, quickly becomes almost silently loyal, even when gunshots are fired through the windows of the Donovans’ home. At this stage, one’s doubts about Bridge of Spies are subdued thanks to the quality of the acting and some nice touches by Spielberg – as when Jim Donovan says grace at the family dinner table with a quiet urgency designed partly to silence his wife. But the script develops a tendency to rhyme or repeat details. Spielberg is keen to emphasise these and the effect is sometimes pat. I liked it that, when we first meet Donovan, he’s debating an insurance claim case and how many clients can benefit from the single incident underlying the claim; the resonance of this with the later two-for-one negotiations in Berlin is amusing and effective. Tom Hanks’s fine playing nearly transcends the crude political juxtaposition of what Donovan sees from the upper deck of a Berlin bus (guards shooting dead the young Germans trying to scale the Wall) and, on his eventual return home, from the window of a New York train (American kids playing ball and clambering over a high wire fence). It’s too much, though, when, on the same commuter train at the end, Donovan gets a quietly admiring smile from the woman passenger who earlier gave him a filthy look when she recognised him from newspaper photos as the defender of the Communist spy. Struck by Abel’s imperturbability when he first goes to see him in custody, Donovan asks if he isn’t worried. ‘Would it help?’ replies Abel. A bit later, Donovan asks a similar question and gets the same response. This first repetition is amusing; the next one – turning Abel into a man with a catchphrase – less so. A larger problem develops in preparing the ground for the East-West negotiations. Spielberg seems to devote as much time as he does to the Gary Powers strand because the aerial sequences have spectacular potential. The Frederic Pryor strand is perfunctory: like the CIA, the director treats Pryor (Will Rogers) as of little importance compared with Powers (Austin Stowell). In Berlin, Spielberg’s appetite for managing large-scale action distracts him from the core of the story and the film starts to drag.
There’s another reason, however, for the loss of momentum when Donovan goes to Europe: you miss his exchanges with Abel. The development of their liking and respect for each other is one of the film’s strongest elements. When Mark Rylance played Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall on television earlier this year, you knew you were watching a fine actor but the performance contained few surprises and grew tedious after a while. Although Rylance’s controlled underplaying contrasted with the obviousness of many of the lines he was given to speak, and the dramatic construction of the piece as a whole, it got to dominate Wolf Hall, infecting others in the cast. In Bridge of Spies, his dry wit is unlike anything else in the film: Rylance compels attention from the start and brings unexpected textures to proceedings. He makes Rudolf Abel convincingly anonymous, gives him a cynical air and subtly conveys how Jim Donovan modifies Abel’s cynicism. Rylance’s deadpan, delayed delivery of punchlines is often funny. At one point, FBI men discuss whether Abel is putting on a fake accent and their puzzlement is believable: Rylance has devised an accent that is very suitably hard to pin down, though I thought I detected Northern Irish notes. (The real Rudolf Abel was born and raised in the north east of England. According to Wikipedia, ‘his father was an ethnic German from Russian and his mother was of Russian descent’. The family left England for Moscow in 1921. Abel moved to North America in 1948.)
Tom Hanks is admirable. It’s crucial to the conception of Bridge of Spies that Jim Donovan is a regular guy and a sharp cookie, and Hanks strikes the balance very well. He gets across Donovan’s persisting incredulity at being involved in defending Abel and then in negotiating with the Soviet authorities. He also shows the lawyer’s intellectual self-confidence: you can see Donovan thinking, ‘I’m smart enough to do this’. The comedy of his shabby treatment by the Americans while he’s in Berlin – he’s in a cramped, freezing room while the CIA men stay in a good hotel – is overworked in the script but not by Hanks. Donovan loses his overcoat at one stage in Berlin. When he gets a new one, with a big fur collar, Tom Hanks is on the verge of looking too impressive (especially since the CIA agent with whom Donovan has most contact is unprepossessing) but this actor’s sovereign ordinariness just about seems him through. Another of Hanks’s qualities proves even more important when Jim Donovan is used as a mouthpiece for core American values. Hanks deflates the rhetoric while persuading you that Donovan means what he says. The acting in the film is generally strong. Amy Ryan does well in the underwritten role of Mary Donovan: she creates her own opportunities to hint at divided feelings. In a small part, as one of Gary Powers’s fellow pilots, Jesse Plemons once again registers.
2 December 2015