Spielberg's 'Bridge': A Believable, Entertaining Reach Across Recent History

Rating: 8/10 (20 October 2015)

Steven Spielberg's "Bridge of Spies" is great entertainment, especially for those who like their stories painted in deep dark colors, cooled by moody late-night drizzle and starring an enormously appealing and empathetic leading man (in this case, the redoubtable Tom Hanks). It's not bad as history, either. Overall, on a scale of 10, I'd give it an eight _ but advise you to read up on the facts before taking in the film.
To understand the story completely, it's important to know what the United States and the Soviets were up to in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and what they were thinking.
In a nutshell, it was the height of the Cold War and the so-called atomic age, a time when both nations worried about being blown out of existence, when the Soviets scored a public relations coup _ and more _ in launching the Sputnik, the first artificial Earth satellite, on Oct. 4, 1957. Now, the Americans figured, their sworn enemy could really do them damage, perhaps sending a bomb into outer space.
Indeed, with this in mind, the U.S. had been sending up its super sophisticated spy plane, the U-2, having it fly over adversaries real and imagined, including the Soviet Union. One of these flights over the Soviet Union commenced on May 1, 1960, with Francis Gary Powers at the controls, and was shot down.
It came at an awkward and embarrassing time for the U.S.
President Eisenhower had met with Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev the previous September in America, and they were so optimistic about their talks that they planned to meet again later in 1960, this time in Moscow.
Eisenhower, still worried over Soviet armaments, had nonetheless okayed the U-2 flights, even at risk of jeopardizing the upcoming talks. When the shoot down occurred, Ike at first denied the flights. But when plane debris _ and Powers himself, very much alive _ were produced, the jig was up, and Khrushchev angrily canceled the summit (perhaps something he had wanted all along anyway).
On August 17, 1960, Powers was convicted of espionage against the Soviet Union and sentenced to 10 years. On February 10, 1962, he was exchanged, along with American student Frederic Pryor, in a spy swap at the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin, for Soviet KGB Colonel Vilyam Fisher, known as "Rudolf Abel," who had been caught by the FBI and tried and jailed for espionage.
OK, that's the story.
'Bridge of Spies' focuses on the spy exchange on that bridge and how the negotiations came about, with Hanks playing New York lawyer James Donovan, who is first pressed into defending Abel (played with exquisite understated menace _ and appeal _ by Mark Rylance of "Wolf Hall" fame), then in fashioning a deal to have him swapped for Powers (a rather bland and somewhat miscast Austin Stowell). Thrown into the mix is American exchange student Pryor (believably if briefly played by Will Rogers), held by the East Germans, who, according to the film, are eager to establish their own independence from the Soviets while at the same time defying the Americans.
The old-fashioned script (and I mean this in the best sense) _ rewritten, oddly enough, by the usually eccentric Ethan and Joel Coen, from Matt Charman's original script _ gives Spielberg the chance to do what he does best, especially when given actors like Hanks (who by the way is superb) and Rylance, which is to weave a story that engrosses and involves, which this film certainly does.
The movie's spy games seem to tear a page out of Carol Reed's "Third Man" playbook, but instead of shadowy black and white scenes shot at askew angles in post World War II Vienna we have rainy, color-drained nights in early-1960s, newly walled Berlin. It works.
If I have a problem with the film, it would probably be with the depiction of Donovan's home life, obviously intended as counterpoint to the shadowy dealings he apparently was involved in, sometimes at the exclusion of his wife and children (to make matters worse, Amy Ryan as the missus just doesn't seem like his kind of gal). I never quite buy into the family as being real, but rather as a rather heavy-handed attempt to present them as a kind of Ozzie and Harriet content with having the kids watch "77 Sunset Strip" as their father's clandestine life begins to enshroud them and their idyllic existence.
I'm also not sure if I quite believe how Hanks' Donovan and Rylance's Abel bond into frankly inexplicable Cold War buddyism, but the technique sets up an interesting dynamic that helps flesh out the period's blurry political and nationalistic borders that often saw friends and enemies switch places at an alarming rate (just as now _ and perhaps that's the point).
Powers' life, ironically, would be cut short a decade and a half later as the news helicopter he was flying over Los Angeles crashed and killed him instantly. But maybe that's yet another point, intended or not. In the kind of backstreet war _ and world _ this film depicts, the greatest threat to our existence sometimes begins at home.