Continuing our retirement commitment of watching lots of movies, even though neither of us have actually completely retired, and are not yet up to seeing tons of movies – at about half a dozen since late June we have about matched our number for the prior two or three years.
We’re now on a mini holiday in Washington DC, taking in a couple of tours arranged by our Representative (Thank you, Alan Lowenthal! We’re having a wonderful time.), or rather his team (Thank you, Becca Brukman!), and otherwise enjoying our national treasures in those amazing museums along the Mall. But, we recalled our plan, and decided to take in Bridge of Spies, which is playing in Georgetown.
Written by Matt Charman and the Coen brothers, and directed by Steven Spielberg, Bridge of Spies tells the true story, for the most part accurately, of the American U-2 spy plane pilot Frances Gary Powers’s exchange for the Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, negotiated by an American private citizen picked for plausible deniability, James. B. Donovan.
Mark Rylance plays Rudolf Able with sympathy and dignity, Austin Stowell plays Frances Gary Powers as the young gung ho pilot who doesn’t take the poison, and, of course, Tom Hanks portrays James B Donovan. The entire cast is first rate, and I feel it important to add in a shout out to Will Rogers who played a graduate student Frederic Pryor who is arrested by the East German authorities and becomes a side deal for Donovan. Lots more goes on, including Donovan’s relationship with his wife Mary, portrayed by Amy Ryan (who certainly deserved more screen time), and their children Roger, played by Noah Schnapps and Peggy played by Jillian Lebling.
After watching the movie and preparing to write this little review I read what some of the professionals are saying. Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post says Spielberg “adroitly establishes the heaviness and barely contained paranoia of the time, which he depicts with rich, unnostalgic atmosphere.” Manohla Dargis of the New York Times calls Bridge of Spies a “meticulously detailed period piece that revisits the anxieties of the past while also speaking to those of the present.” Over at what I’m coming to feel is the gold standard, Rotten Tomatoes, the audience score is 91% favorable, while the pros go up a point to 92%.
The atmospherics are compelling. I didn’t notice until I read it that there was no score under the film until a frightening scene where Hanks realizes he is being followed, or perhaps, stalked. Anyone who lived through the era will feel a sense of recognition, and not all of it positive. For people who were adults then the sense of patriotism was run through with paranoia, while as a child in those times, I thought the film perfectly captured a child’s obsession with how to survive the near certain coming nuclear holocaust. And of course echoes for our own times are never far away…
And at the center of it all this is a film about a man of honor. Tom Hanks has become this generation’s Jimmy Stewart. Although as seems necessary for our more nuanced era, more subtly played. Deep into the film the spy Able tells Hanks the story of a man he was told to watch in his childhood. He seems ordinary, evening boring. Then during hard times when partisans came to the house and beat that man, he kept getting up, only to beaten down, again. But, he always stood back up.
For me that moment captures the film, and what makes it possibly a great film. Almost certainly a great film. I’m positive an Academy award nomination, rather several, must already be in the works. And deservedly so. In a time when cynicism is the rule of the day, Bridge of Spies is a film about integrity and honor, and, never, ever leaving anyone behind.
Anyone need a sweet breath of hope for our human condition, a hint at a small chance we won’t let fear and greed drive us over the cliff and into the abyss? This film perfectly captures what gives us that chance. Small as it might be.
As Rogers and Ebert would say, two thumbs up.
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