Bridge of Spies

The first time we see Tom Hanks as insurance attorney Jim Donovan in Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, he doesn’t seem like the kind of Tom Hanks character we’ve come to know and love. He’s wrangling with an opposing attorney about the disposition of a case he’s working on, a car accident in which Donovan’s client – the insurance company – has argued that it’s on the hook only for one specific accident in which five separate motorcyclists were injured, limiting the monetary compensation.

This is weaselly lawyer-speak, it feels like, except that it’s not; Donovan is absolutely committed to a concept of fairness that he thinks is essential in order for the system – any system – to function.

That’s the Tom Hanks we know, our modern-day Jimmy Stewart, and that sensibility is crucial as Bridge of Spies unfolds. Set in 1957, it’s the fact-based story of how Donovan came to be assigned as the public defender for Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), a Russian spy facing possible execution for espionage. The prosecution and judge want the appearance of a fair trial that holds up America’s ideals during the peak of the Cold War, but they don’t really care about whether it’s actually fair. Unfortunately for everyone, except perhaps Abel himself, Donovan cares.

Bridge of Spies plays out baldly as an allegory for our contemporary approach to the War on Terror, as fear of an opposing ideology leads both government and private citizens to abandon principles when they prove inconvenient. Donovan pushes repeatedly for a representation of his client that’s not merely perfunctory, even though there’s not really any doubt regarding Abel’s guilt. We don’t win, Donovan insists, by putting Abel away during a show trial; we win by demonstrating the American principles we want to protect from The Other aren’t just as threatened by our own desire for security.

Hanks’ ability to make moral clarity and decency interesting is essential here, as Bridge of Spies eventually turns to focus on Donovan’s role in negotiating the exchange of Abel to the Soviets for downed U2 spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell). The film spends a surprising amount of time on Powers’ preparations for his mission, and while it’s important to emphasize that both sides were doing the same thing that Americans were so enraged about Abel doing, the story starts to lose focus whenever it drifts from Donovan’s mission.

There are a few places where Bridge of Spies feels clunky or formulaic. Donovan’s defense of Abel naturally results in people threatening him and his family, leading to the inevitable domestic conflicts as Donovan’s wife (Amy Ryan) tries to dissuade him from his dogged pursuit of the case. And as Donovan’s negotiations with the Russians and East Germans take over the story, the number of players in the diplomatic game of chicken becomes a challenge to navigate.

Yet there’s still an edge to this story of sticking to a by-the-book sense of justice, as Spielberg shows us Russian snipers killing Germans trying to flee over the newly-erected Berlin Wall in 1961. There’s no attempt to whitewash the idea that totalitarian Communism was a genuine threat to freedom; the only question is how we react to that knowledge. When passengers on a commuter train stare holes through Jim Donovan because they recognize him as Rudolf Abel’s attorney, then later look at him as hero for his actions brokering the prisoner exchange, Jim Donovan himself is the same guy. It’s because of Hanks’ performance that we understand that, whether it’s hard or whether it’s easy, doing the right thing is still doing the right thing.

BRIDGE OF SPIES (3) Directed by Steven Spielberg • Starring Tom Hanks, Mark Rylance, Amy Ryan • PG-13 • 142 min. • At Maya Cinemas, Century Cinemas Del Monte, Northridge Cinemas, Lighthouse Cinema.