“It’s insane. I gotta- non-fiction entertainment to me, is more- is a better way to spend your time than anything that you could possibly make up”, he said.
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There are two sides to Steven Spielberg as a director.
Tom Hanks plays James B. Donovan, a successful insurance attorney in Brooklyn, New York who’s asked by his firm’s partners to represent Abel. Neither of these things should take away from your enjoyment of what is a very good, if not great, movie.
To fuel this fire, I like Bridge of Spies quite a bit; better than War Horse, but not more than Munich, in my opinion.
Spielberg is working off of a smart script, written by relative newcomer Matt Charman and then burnished expertly by Ethan and Joel Coen, one that builds drama in the smallest of moments. Maybe the brothers should stick to directing their own stuff and avoid movies about people getting shot out of the sky. Yet his character’s a dry source of purity that, as the husband and father begins to feel protective over Abel and another American captured in Eastern Europe, moves earnestly among one-note characters that offer no surprise.
Donovan goes from being hated for his defense of Abel to being respected for bringing the American boys home, and while I respect the arc of Donovan’s story, Spielberg adds an extra layer of cheese to the movie’s ending that made my eyes roll. And that tally still stands at one. It works in a few places, particularly in beautifully, tightly composed shots, but Spielberg can be heavy-handed, relying on kitschy editing tricks and, more egregiously, Thomas Newman’s score to communicate that YOU SHOULD BE FEELING EMOTIONS NOW. Like that historical drama, much of the dialogue-heavy Bridge of Spies unfolds as procedural- placing value on conversation, compromise, and the multifaceted critical thinking required of effective political maneuvering-while taking place in smoke-filled, curtain-drawn government backrooms captured exquisitely by Spielberg’s longtime cinematographer Januz Kaminski.
“[Donovan] wrote a book about his experience with Rudolf Abel that goes so in depth into the trial, I felt like I was a court stenographer after a while”.
The descriptor for “Bridge of Spies” that kept coming to mind was “old-fashioned”, even though that seems like I’m making it easy to dismiss.
“The next mistake our countries make could be the last one”, says Jim Donovan (Tom Hanks) to one of the chief KGB negotiators while trying to come to an agreement about the United States and Russian Federation swapping spies during the height of the Cold War in the thriller, Bridge of Spies. “He’s always wanted to find a way to do it, and as soon as he realized that this guy Rudolf Abel was living amongst us in New York in the ’60s, he wanted to know how he moved around the city”.
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“Bridge of Spies” opens in theaters nationwide tomorrow.
