ESPIONAGE,
SPIELBERG STYLE by Bennett Campbell Ferguson
Above:
Tom Hanks stars in Mr. Spielberg’s movie.
Photo ©Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures and 20TH Century
Fox.
With gorgeous finesse, Steven
Spielberg’s movie “Bridge of Spies” reconstructs the Cold War as a chess game
starring an American lawyer in a porkpie hat.
The lawyer’s name is James Donovan, and he seethes quietly as he watches
liberties restricted in the name of security.
Myriad agents of the United States populate the movie, and too many of them
brush off the delicacies of due process as if they were crumbs.
In the late 1950s, Donovan represented Rudolf Abel (Mark
Rylance), who was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union. Abel was sentenced to thirty years in prison,
but in the wake of the capture of U.S. pilot Francis Gary Powers (Austin
Stowell), the plan for a swap was broached, and Donovan was tapped to journey
to East Berlin for the final stretch of negotiations.
In “Bridge of Spies,” Donovan is played by Tom Hanks who,
since his “Sleepless in Seattle” heyday, has puffed up considerably—as a
performer. This is fortuitous, because as
seen via Mr. Spielberg’s wiry spectacles, Donovan is not only a noble, suit-wearing
shyster, but a righteous truth teller and a gleaming symbol of idealized American
individualism. With a delightful touch
of thorniness, Mr. Hanks embodies those lofty qualities, testing himself (and
us) by shading Donovan with sheens of slippery canniness.
Hence the numerous scenes where Mr. Hanks, bowing his
head in a wimpy manner, pulls a scraggly Kleenex from his pocket and showers it
with nose mucus. Once, Donovan gloweringly
reminds the Soviet and East German negotiators that he has a cold, and he does
(it’s a souvenir of tromping through the East Berlin snow without his gray
overcoat). And yet Donovan craftily wafts
attention towards his runny nose with each sniff, as if to say, “Go ahead,
underestimate me”—right before he socks his counterparts with a knowing demand.
Mr. Spielberg has no such pretensions of concealing his own
craftiness. Aided by the indomitable
cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (his creative partner on the justly legendary “Schindler’s
List,” and a mountain of other movies), Mr. Spielberg cloaks the film’s
streets, restaurants, and offices in entrancingly sinister shadows. There is grace in this menace (Mr. Spielberg appears
to view the divide between cinema and poetry as tenuous at best), and also in
the moment when Powers is torn by wind and gunfire from his U2 spy plane, thousands
of feet above the planet. The camera
doesn’t just film his descent—it swivels downward to take in Powers’ legs as
they dangle over green-tinged earth beneath, drawing us dizzyingly (and exhilaratingly)
into the frame.
But is “Bridge of Spies” truly gasp-worthy? Not always.
The film unfolds in the sonic lap of composer Thomas Newman, whose music
is sometimes bafflingly clownish (a menacing choral fanfare played during
Powers’ hallucinatory interrogation in a grimy Soviet prison screams “X-Men,”
not torture and imprisonment). What
could be worse? Perhaps the film’s ludicrous
coda, during which a stateside Donovan cheerily watches three children leap
over a fence—a mirror for an earlier image of three Germans being shot while
scaling the Berlin Wall. Ah, America.
And
yet “Bridge of Spies” still holds you.
That’s partly because of its visual pleasures, but it’s also because of
its ideological force. Early in the
film, a CIA agent asks Donovan to violate attorney-client privilege and divulge
information about Abel; Donovan refuses.
The only thing that makes him and anyone else an American, he says, is the
constitution, or as he calls it, “the rule book.” That might sound obvious, but in a world of
prejudice and paranoia, it’s anything but.
It’s
actually quite radical.
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