Hanks is cracking in this Cold War tale IT’S
There aren’t many insurance claim lawyers whose stories have inspired major feature films, and attracted hollywood heavyweights such as Steven Spielberg, Tom hanks and the Coen brothers. But such is the singular legacy of James Donovan, the Brooklyn attorney who found himself at the heart of one of the most remarkable episodes of the Cold War. Donovan specialised in insurance, but in 1957 was offered the thankless task of defending the Soviet spy rudolf Abel. Later, he brokered the exchange of Abel for the American spyplane pilot Francis Gary Powers, who had been captured by the russians.
Directed by Spielberg, with hanks as Donovan and Mark rylance as Abel, Bridge of Spies – which had its world premiere last night in New York – tells this extraordinary story with i ntelligence and flair. Only occasionally does it get bogged down in the treacle for which Spielberg has such an irrepressible sweet tooth.
The film starts compellingly, Abel (whose gentle Scottish accent is never properly explained) mixing his clandestine activities with a mundane existence as an artist.
rylance is quite brilliant, playing the part with such an air of good-humoured resignation and lack of shiftiness that you only reluctantly come to believe that he might be part of any kind of plot. But the FBI and the CIA do so much more readily. Soon he is behind bars, and publicly reviled. By association, Donovan is reviled too, the more so when he protests that the hallowed American justice system is failing his client.
Nobly idealistic, and prepared to place principles even before his wife Mary (Amy ryan) and three kids, Donovan seems almost too good to be true. In another hollywood era, he would have been played by James Stewart, or possibly Spencer Tracy. But hanks does this sort of thing so well that it’s mostly a pleasure to go along for the ride.
Donovan’s story was not widely known until the British playwright Matt Charman became fascinated by it and took it to Spielberg. his screenplay, co-written with the illustrious Coens, splendidly evokes the ‘reds under the bed’ paranoia of eisenhower-era America.
The story of Powers, whose U2 spy-plane was shot down in 1960, is less adroitly handled, sometimes seeming as if it is crammed in purely to nudge the narrative along. But it does allow one typically Spielbergian flourish, when the ejected pilot sees the plummeting wreckage of his aircraft through his parachute.
Soon the film is on safer ground, as Donovan flies to Berlin, ‘invited’ by the CIA to negotiate the release of Powers as a private citizen, so that US diplomats can keep their noses clean. The transaction is complicated, however, when he insists that it must include another captured American, a student arrested by the east Germans on trumpedup spying charges.
a cracking tale, and very largely true, though I wish Spielberg had resisted one or two bursts of heavy-handed imagery comparing freedom-loving America with oppressed eastern europe. There’s a laughably unsubtle example right at the end when Donovan, back in New York, looks out of a train window and sees a bunch of carefree kids jumping over a fence, reminding him of a ghastly scene at the Berlin Wall.
Yet on the whole Bridge of Spies does just what it is meant to do, and brings the Cold War beguilingly, unsettlingly, back to life.
Bridge of Spies is released on November 27.