Solid

Rating: 7/10 (27 October 2015)

A solid piece of work by Spielberg and his collaborators. Tom Hanks, the James Stewart of our day, incarnates honourable American values but manages, in a way Stewart never would or probably could, to convey his awareness of their fragility. The business of holding fast to one's values in a challenging world is the spine of the film's message, dramatised in the relationship between spy Rudolph Abel and Hanks' character, lawyer James Donovan, in this tale of Cold War brinkmanship.
Abel is played by someone who I have no hesitation in naming as one of our era's greatest actors: Mark Rylance. Very familiar to theatre audiences in the UK, he has appeared infrequently on screen. I have a feeling this situation is going to change as a result of his typically superb performance here. Watching him and Hanks play their scenes together was for me the film's main pleasure.
Hanks is well partnered too in his scenes with Mikhail Gorevoy as a Russian diplomat and Sebastian Koch as an East German lawyer. Austin Stowell is excellently cast as Gary Powers, the American pilot whose capture reconfigures Abel's fate, and there are a number of other first rate cameos, including Peter McRobbie's turn as John Foster Dulles.
The women have a rotten time. Amy Ryan has little to do but smile or worry as Hanks' wife. Nadja Bobyleva manages to make a mark with an emotional scene as the Berlin Wall is being built, one of the film's most chilling sequences.
The film's stand-out sequence on the technical front is a terrifying plane crash, one of those jaw-dropping set-pieces that are hallmarks of a Spielberg movie. In this story there's not much room for another of those hallmarks - sentimentality - but where Spielberg can find it - mainly in the scenes around Hanks' family - he puts it in.
Still and all, it's definitely worth going to see BRIDGE OF SPIES, not least for Rylance's masterclass in screen acting.