Two For One.

Rating: 7/10 (1 July 2016)

In the early 50s, the quiet, middle-aged amateur artist, Walter Abel is arrested. He's a Soviet spy. Tom Hanks is appointed to defend him but it's all supposed to be pro forma. Hanks is supposed to wave the fourth amendment, mention due process and protection from search and seizure, then sit down and shut up. But he takes his job as defense counsel seriously and nobody likes it. He can't possibly get Abel off but still he's defending a Russky espionage agent. Everyone is anxious to see this guy get the chair.
It was disheartening to see that the director has Hanks sitting on a subway at this point while all the strap hangers are reading about the trial in the newspapers and glare at him. The reason it's disheartening is that such a scene surely never happened in real life. Who the hell knows what Abel's defense attorney looked like -- or if they had seen photos of him, would recognize the innocent Hanks sitting on a subway train. And another reason that it's disheartening is that the director doesn't trust the audience to know what's already been made clear -- Hanks is ill thought of because he's defending a hated enemy. Really, earlier scenes in court and at Hanks' home have made that very clear.
The judge is eager to hang Abel too, but Hanks, an insurance lawyer, visits the judge at home and points out that if Abel is put in prison instead of the graveyard, the U. S. will have a little something in its back pocket to trade in case something similar happens to one of our agents in Moscow. Just in case, you know, kind of like an insurance policy. The judge is convinced and Abel gets thirty years, much to the anger of the public at large. While the two sit quietly in the visiting room listening to Shostakovitch, Able remarks, not unkindly, that Hanks "should be careful", and in fact a couple of bullets are fired through the windows of his home. When he loses his appeal to the Supreme Court, it's back to the insurance business for Hanks. He's summarily snubbed.
Meanwhile, however, there has been a parallel story. The CIA has developed the super-secret U-2, a spy plane whose service altitude is 70,000 feet. That's pretty high up, out of the range of known Soviet missiles. But then, as Leo Strauss has pointed out, there are "unknown unknowns" and one of them is that Soviet missiles can bring down an airplane at 70,000 feet, which they duly do. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, has been instructed to destroy both himself and the airplane if it should be brought down in Russian territory but he's unable to do either. The Soviets get both prizes and make the most of their exploit in the media, embarrassing president Dwight D. Eisenhower who at first claimed no knowledge of the spying. (This detail isn't in the movie.) Powers is tried and given ten years in a Soviet prison. Ugh.
Hanks is given the job of arranging a prisoner exchange in East Berlin, all on his own. His mission is to trade Abel for Powers and another guy, Pryor, a graduate student from Yale who was detained for no particular reason. Again, it's not mentioned in the movie but John F. Kennedy was president at the time and Hanks' character had his full backing except that Kennedy, a Harvard man, said he "wouldn't bust his *** getting a Yale man out."
The CIA cares nothing at all about Pryor. They only want to get Powers back, although they all hate him for having survived. The fact that Powers has suffered in an East German prison and kept awake for extended periods to squeeze information out of him means nothing to the CIA. In the end, due to Hanks' determination, the swap is accomplished after much bureaucratic haggling, and both Americans are released, while Abel is sent back to his family.
Good stuff. Nice photography and visual f/x. The scene of Powers' U-2 being shot down is thrilling. Tom Hanks brings an unusual edginess to the role of the central figure. He's jumpy, nervous, speaks rapidly, paces. Think of Gregory Peck. Now think of the opposite, except for the concordant confidence. As James B. Donovan, Hanks has a wife and two lovely kiddies. The kids are a little cute, but Hanks' wife, Amy Ryan, is just about right. She's pretty without being Hollywood gorgeous. And she doesn't provide unconditional support, nor does she nag. Nice job of writing.
The standout performance is by Mary Rylance as Rudolf Abel. Rylance gives us a wimpy little spy, wily, artistic, unflappable. He's taciturn and when he speaks it's with a Scottish accent and what he says is keenly perceptive. It's never slow because with the exception of Abel, all the character speak quickly, as in a thirty-second TV commercial. At time it felt as if the camera were undercranked.
The director, Spielberg, could easily have ruined the film by turning Hanks into a brave and resolute hero instead of a guy who insists on playing by the rules, who is anxious to get home and go to bed, who is frightened when cornered by some German kids who demand his warm coat in the middle of winter. Abel could have been turned into a stereotypical Russian spy, bald, ugly, and snarling defiantly. Instead of being snubbed after his return, Francis Gary Powers might have been hailed as a proud representative of Uncle Sam and given a ticker tape parade. And so on until we're not watching an adult movie but a children's cartoon.