But at a press conference for his upcoming movie, Bridge of Spies, Spielberg was compelled to clarify these statements. That Donovan is played by Tom Hanks, the great American dad of us all, certainly goes a long way in helping us find the humanity in all this process. Here Hanks is as sturdily reliable-decent, restrained-as he was in 2013’s Captain Phillips, another based-on-a-true-story film about cooler heads prevailing.
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If it weren’t for the band of chiseled Federal Bureau of Investigation agents following him around, no one would ever suspect him of being an agent: He has a warm, round face and stubby, bushy eyebrows that wobble up and down when he talks.
“Bridge of Spies is about the art of the conversation”, he says.
That sense of paranoia permeates “Bridge of Spies”, which depicts the stress felt by Donovan and his family as he persisted in trying to provide Abel with the best defense possible – even kicking his case all the way up to the Supreme Court – to the strong, sometimes violent disapproval of his fellow Americans. To polish Charman’s screenplay, Spielberg tapped brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, who had been angling to collaborate with him on a project.
When Hanks and Spielberg come together, the audience can usually expect quality filmmaking, and “Bridge of Spies” meets this expectation. Audiences applauded the film during its World Premiere at the New York Festival on Sunday. Even five years ago there wasn’t an audience for everything. The PG-13 drama/ thriller arrives in theaters October 16. Can Spielberg be my history teacher from now on? And while the movie won’t go wide until next week, a few new clips will let you in on the intrigue.
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More importantly – and, for Spielberg fans, of particular interest – is that the film is, outside of those two setpieces, among the talkiest of all his pictures, second perhaps only to “Lincoln”. Rather, Bridge of Spies is an interior, introverted kind of movie, composed mainly of scenes of men talking in rooms about big, faraway things. Bridge of Spies is, instead, mostly just a story of what was, which makes the film nearly quaint-its earnestness and wry, folksy humor seem to come moseying in from the past, from the film days of old, when politics didn’t have to be so dang murky or pointed.
