Philadelphia meets Schindler's List

Rating: 8/10 (30 December 2015)

Personally I thought the movie was a bit too heavy-handed and that the ending was way more melodramatic than it should have been. But the movie was good. More than that, it is a story that must be shown today. I felt the ending kind of ruined the effect a little bit, though.
The story is that of a lawyer who believes in the law - imagine that - and because of his extraordinary efforts to defend a Russian spy in the heavily patriotic legal system from 1957 he is tagged to intermediate a prisoner exchange. You get this idea directly from the trailer and the plot, as it were, is not deviating from that. Instead, it is Hanks' acting and Spielberg's directing that you need to appreciate, as they masterfully make the case for the spirit of America, not for its power.
The film is based on a real person, and his own autobiographical book, and it is well rendered, albeit a bit paint-by-numbers. The title of my review is more accurate than I would have wanted. Even so, I felt that the first part of the movie was great and that it should have been a film on its own. You get a man that is doing his job and upholding the moral values Americans are so proud of by defending a man that everyone thinks is despicably guilty and as reward gets scoffed at, gets the evil eye and even has shots fired at his house - 2nd amendment style - from a driving by car, only to be blamed for it by the police officers called to investigate. He returns to his job only to find that cases he was assigned to were reassigned and his partners are reluctant to speak to him.
That message is far more relevant today than the general result driven heroics that movies - including this one - usually portray. The point is that good means different things for different people and therefore it never actually wins. The fact that Donovan had a successful career as a negotiator later on is good for Donovan, but I felt it hurt the movie.