Butler's Cinema Scene

“BRIDGE OF SPIES” My rating: B+

142 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Tom Hanks’ singular status as this century’s James Stewart pays off big time in “Bridge of Spies,” Steven Spielberg’s recreation of one of the Cold War’s lesser known stories.

As the real-life James Donovan, a New York insurance lawyer pulled into the world of espionage and international intrigue, Hanks is wry, moving, and astonishingly ethical. He practically oozes bedrock American decency.

Which was precisely what this movie needs.

The screenplay by the Coen Brothers and Matt Charman runs simultaneously on four tracks.

In the first Soviet spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) is arrested in NYC in 1957 by federal agents. As no lawyer wants to represent him, the Bar Association basically plays spin the bottle — and assigns the job to Donovan.

Jim Donovan believes that every accused person deserves the best defense possible. In fact, he alienates the judge, the feds, and the general public by standing up for his client’s rights and assuming that this is going to be a fair trial when everybody else wants just to go through the motions before sentencing Abel to death.

On a parallel track is the story of Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell), a military flyboy recruited for a top-secret project and trained to spy on the U.S.S.R. from a one-man U-2 reconnaissance aircraft.  Alas, on his very first mission in 1960 he’s shot down, fails in an attempt to commit suicide, and falls into the hands of the Commies.

Then there’s the arrest in 1961 of Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers), an American grad student studying economics who finds himself trapped on the wrong side of the newly constructed Berlin Wall and vanishes into the labyrinthine East German justice system.

All this comes to a head when Donovan, several years after Abel’s conviction, is dispatched to Berlin in an ex officio capacity to arrange a swap of the Soviet spy for Francis Gary Powers.  And if in the process he can somehow free Fred Pryor from a damp cell, so much the better.

The yarn is so big and dramatic that it seems improbable…yet it happened. (What’s more, a few years later Donovan was dispatched to Cuba to negotiate the release of anti-Communists captured in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion.)

Mark Rylance, Tom Hanks

“Bridge of Spies” — the title refers to the blockaded span between East and West Berlin on which prisoner exchanges were made — is as much about establishing a Cold War ethos as it is about the world of spying.  The Red Scare still is in full force in the good old U.S.A., and Donovan finds his patriotism questioned. (And, in a made-up-for-the-movie plot twist that feels phony, has his family home shot up by “real” Americans.)

Spielberg nicely creates a suffocating aura of paranoia that threatens to turn good folk against one another. He even finds time to plumb the atomic nightmares of Donovan’s youngest child, who endures a duck-and-cover film at school and now can spout all sorts of hair-curling statistics about megatonnage and nuclear kill zones.

The film is even less flattering of life behind the Iron Curtain, where informants are everywhere and families are gunned down trying to slip over the wall to freedom.

Within this history lesson, though, are many genuinely human moments. The relationship between Donovan and his client is one of mutual respect. The owl-like Abel refuses to cooperate with his captors and wears a mask of deadpan fatalism that somehow makes the leap from resignation to hilarity.

Donovan’s relations with his own family are strained, with the Missus (Amy Ryan) and kids wondering why Dad is making them all pariahs over a lousy Red.

And the seething stewpot of Iron Curtain politics — with the native East Germans and the ever-hovering Soviets jockeying for power — is presented in all its confusion.  Sebastian Koch is particularly effective as an East German “lawyer” who is far more powerful — and insidious — than he first appears.

Holding it all together is Hanks, an actor who doesn’t have to do a lot to make a big statement. Hanks is so solid it doesn’t even feel like acting. He just is.

| Robert W. Butler