In 1957 James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks) is a skilled insurance lawyer tasked with defending Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) a man suspected of being a Soviet spy. His family and friends are unenthusiastic and even his colleagues don’t believe in the case, merely wanting it to be a show of American due process before the man is inevitably found guilty. But Donovan believes in the integrity of his profession and gives Abel as fair a chance as he can. Meanwhile an American spy, Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell) is shot down and captured by the Soviets, who offer him in a prisoner exchange for Abel to take place at the Glienicke Bridge on the border of East and West Germany.
The pervading theme of the first part of the movie is prejudice and presumed guilt. The justices and other lawyers have no doubts that Abel is a spy and treat the case as a public relations stunt rather than a fair trial, clashing with Donovan’s earnest, all-American values. It’s an uphill battle to attempt to defend Abel’s innocence, and even fighting for his rights fairly earns Donovan scorn and derision. He’s labelled as someone helping the enemy. The antagonist figures of the court are depicted as trying to shortcut and subvert the law just to get Abel convicted, including conducting an unwarranted search of his home. Indeed Donovan seems to be the only American with any scruples, as he’s quick to declare any evidence found by the search to be null. He’s the Capra hero citing the rule of law and common sense against an ignorant society desperate to punish someone seemingly representative of a current enemy. It’s not hard to see the modern commentary in this atmosphere of fear and scapegoating that Spielberg emphasises. In fact it’s more pertinent in 2019 than it was in 2015. And it’s fine to include this theme, even if it is pretty transparent, with characters acting very one-dimensionally ignorant and bigoted, while seemingly no one seems to back Donovan up.
But what halts the films’ impact here is the fact that Abel was very much a spy so it doesn’t have the sympathetic thrust of the underdog unfairly targeted for crimes he didn’t commit. The only moral drama of the trial then is to showcase Donovan’s unbiased rectitude, something which doesn’t have the desired effect because he’s played by Tom Hanks and we’re used to that from Hanks by now. Indeed if the movie is going for that unfairly persecuted angle, the story Spielberg chose to tell was the wrong fit. An idea that would have been much more worth exploring is touched on a little at the end when Powers is retrieved. The intelligence officers give him the cold shoulder assuming he had compromised information during his time as a captive and his only reassurance of course comes from Donovan. And this would have made for an interesting theme to explore: the mistrust with which formerly captured spies are treated, and the ostracisation they might feel after all the risks they took for their country. But this would have required Powers be the more vital player in the story and that it continue after the dramatic exchange. Spielberg and the writers were more interested in Donovan and Abel.
Which reminds me, two of the writers for this movie were strangely enough, Joel and Ethan Coen. And it’s fascinating because the movie is written well (enough so to have gotten an Oscar nomination), but has little of the Coens’ unique stamp to it that characterizes other projects they’ve only written like Gambit and Suburbicon -excepting perhaps the detail of the plot revolving around people being kidnapped. They wrote the screenplay with Matt Charman, and its possible then that he contributed a lot of the sensibility, but who’s to say. All I know is it’s perhaps the least-Coen Brothers a Coen Brothers script has been (though in fairness I haven’t seen Unbroken, and that doesn’t seem in their wheelhouse either).
The movie certainly could have used some quirky Coen Brothers characters though, as the ones that dominate this film aren’t terribly interesting. The exception to that rule is Abel, largely due to the performance of British stage veteran Mark Rylance, who since this movie has become Spielberg’s favourite actor. While he’s a character surrounded in a lot of mystery, he also feels honest and honourable, even friendly, his conversations with Donovan being almost pleasant. Rylance really plays him with a kind vulnerability, again to help sell that impression of a man unjustly accused, and his quiet unassuming nature does endear him a little more favourably than if he’d been portrayed more vocally and physically resistant. There’s a world-weariness to him as well, all he really wants to do is paint, which astutely conveys a sadness in his connection to such high-stakes espionage. It’s the best performance of the film, though not quite deserving of the Oscar Rylance won for it over Sylvester Stallone. Surprisingly, Tom Hanks doesn’t actually offer a lot. He’s not giving a bad performance by any means, there have been few of those in the guys’ career, but it really has no quantitative degree of substance. He’s playing the democratic American hero standing up for the little guy and summoning the courage needed to carry through with the tense exchange that serves as the movies’ eventual focus. The only character we can really glean from Donovan is through his relationships with his family, and what we see there is mostly their disapproval and embarrassment at the case he’s involved in -which they would have good reason to be even if they weren’t as paranoid about the Soviets as the people Donovan works with, given The Godfather Part II style hit that takes place on their house at one point. We get the best sense of Donovan’s family man personality through a nice relationship with his young son Roger played by a pre-Stranger Things Noah Schnapp. But it’s not nearly enough to really care about Donovan as a person. His wife and his daughter are played by Amy Ryan and Eve Hewson respectively, with Billy Magnussen and Jesse Plemons relatively standing out in a supporting cast that also includes Sebastian Koch, Scott Shepherd, and Alan Alda.
All of this amounts to the movie being rather a dull experience, especially once the focus shifts to the prisoner exchange. The story doesn’t successfully convey enough tension and the characters aren’t relatably motivated or played. The cinematography is good and the atmosphere excellent, I appreciate the effort that went into conveying a sense of bleakness and danger at the Berlin Wall. But this is by design a much more quiet story, and one that’s difficult to make compelling. Spielberg incorporates more drama certainly than the real event to levy that, but it’s not quite enough to keep it from being underwhelming.
There’s some technique to admire in Bridge of Spies, but it’s by no means an enjoyable experience. At most it’s a curiosity like Always, though one definitely indicative of a more mature and competent filmmaker. It received a fair bit of Awards attention in 2016, though I have to suspect with the exception of Rylance’s nod (its only win), it was mostly legacy recognition for Spielberg. By now Spielberg undeniably had a legacy to his name, one nearing the degree of directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Akira Kurosawa, both of whom continued to work consistently (relatively, in the latter case) into their twilight years. And with that much experience and artistic maturity, it makes sense for one to consider their legacy and self-reflect, something Spielberg has started to do recently, beginning with his follow-up to Bridge of Spies: a kind of movie he hadn’t made in decades.
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch
Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jbosch/
Comments
Post a Comment