Spielberg And The Cold War

Rating: 10/10 (19 October 2015)

The forty-five year period between 1945 and 1990 is one that the whole world knew as the Cold War. During that time, there was a huge struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union for control of how much of the planet should be free or under the yoke of the atheistic system that was Communism; and at several points, that war almost went from cold to hot. In the main, it was primarily a war of intelligence gathering; and the possibility of spies being captured on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain was always a possibility. Such an event is the subject of director Steven Spielberg's 2015 Cold War suspense thriller BRIDGE OF SPIES, the 27th film in this legendary director's career.
Tom Hanks, who has made it his business of playing an Everyman, portrays the role of James Donovan, a New York insurance lawyer who, in 1957, was thrown into the breach of the Cold War by being forced to defend a KGB agent named Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) on three counts related to espionage activity. Although Hanks loses that case in court, Rylance is spared the electric chair because, as Hanks admonishes those in high places, the day may very well come when the Soviet Union might capture one of our spies behind their lines, and that a prisoner exchange might well be necessary.
Three years later, in 1960, that very possibility comes to the fore when Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell), a U-2 pilot working for the CIA, is captured by the Soviet Union after one of their missiles downs his aircraft. Hanks sees a huge opportunity for both countries (neither Rylance nor Stowell have divulged anything to their captors); but this potential boon is tainted by the capture of an American graduate student named Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers) on the wrong side of the newly-completed Berlin Wall in the winter of 1961. Hanks then gets a hard lesson in the bizarre nature of Cold War politics, as Rogers is being held by East German officials, and both they and the Soviets are on different pages when it comes to the Communist political playbook.
With the help of some fairly cagey maneuvering on his part, though it is severely looked down by his fellow Americans in general, and his own wife (Amy Ryan) in particular, as coddling an enemy agent, he manages to set up the moment of truth for all three men on the Glienicke Bridge (the actual bridge that is known as the Bridge Of Spies) that separates Berlin from Potsdam, all of this without any shots being fired in anger.
Given that these events happened half a century in the past, and that an entire generation has grown up not knowing what the Cold War actually was, almost any other filmmaker might have had a very difficult time making the story clear. But then Spielberg has never been just any other filmmaker, and, being part of that generation that did know the fear that life as they knew it could end in a matter of hours, he knew that this was a story with huge implications, both political and humanistic. BRIDGE OF SPIES is a masterpiece of tension and suspense, with Spielberg continuing to show the influence of Alfred Hitchcock in his work; and Hanks basically does a role not dissimilar to James Stewart in several of Hitchcock's classic films. The depiction of the Cold War is magnified in the way Spielberg depicts the way the Berlin Wall cut off both the eastern and western parts of that city, and how Soviet soldiers cut down those who tried to jump over the wall (not unlike similar scenes involving the Nazi death camps in the director's 1993 masterpiece SCHINDLER'S LIST. Rylance gives a superb low-key performance as Abel, a man resigned to his fate whatever it is but willing to accept what comes from it, gaining a lot of respect from Hanks in the process. Spielberg also superbly recreates that horribly tense period of the late 1950s and early 1960s where America was at risk, probably less from its fears of the bomb than its own anti-Soviet paranoia.
Because John Williams, Spielberg's long-time collaborator, was unavailable due to health issues, Thomas Newman, part of Hollywood's illustrious film scoring dynasty, stepped in to do the score for BRIDGE OF SPIES; and while it may not have the typical verve of Williams, Newman's score has a lot to recommend it, including the influences of both Shostakovich and Copland, avoiding the easy and (in some ways) expected patriotic cues. Sober and serious much of the time, but with the added wit and gravitas of Hanks' and Rylance's performances to keep the story from getting too grim, BRIDGE OF SPIES is another masterpiece in a long line of masterpieces for Spielberg, especially in his collaborations with Hanks; and it is a film that reminds us that the Cold War, though a part of history now, is also still an important part of that history.