In Steven Spielberg’s true-to-life espionage thriller Bridge of Spies, Tom Hanks plays James B. Donovan, the insurance lawyer who went on a Cold War secret mission to negotiate the trade of a captured Russian spy for the captured US spy plane pilot Francis Gay Powers. That Russian spy was Rudolph Abel, played by Mark Rylance – himself perhaps the best reason to see this movie.
Rylance is a top echelon Shakespearean actor from the UK – best known in the US for his star turn as the dour Thomas Cromwell in the television miniseries Wolf Hall. In a remarkably minimalist yet evocative performance, Rylance reveals a man who lives by a code and is doggedly loyal to his own misguided cause – with absolutely no expectations of fairness or mercy from anyone else. The effect is to make us sympathize with a guy who is trying to give our most menacing enemy our dearest nuclear secrets. As my friend Karyn noted about Rylance, “less is more”.
This is not a great movie. Sure, Spielberg is the master of entertainment (complete with sentimentally swelling music at the end). After the movie’s riveting opening sequence of spy craft, we settle into a sometimes ponderous segment showing the Abel trial and the U-2 missions. Bridge of Spies takes off again when Hanks’ Donovan must head behind the Iron Curtain.
[SPOILER ALERT – After seeing the film, I was compelled to research James B. Donovan to see if he really represented Abel and negotiated both the Abel-for-Powers deal AND the release of over a thousand Cuban prisoners from the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Indeed, he did – all of the acts depicted in the movie seem to be factual. But the real James B. Donovan was not the Everyman portrayed by Spielberg and Hanks. Before going into private practice, Donovan served a stint as the General Counsel of the OSS – the predecessor of the CIA. While slipping off to East Berlin to barter for Powers, he was on the New York City Board of Education. And, instead of returning to obscurity after bringing Powers back to the US, he ran for US Senate from New York.]