[yasr_overall_rating]
With the exact same running time as one of the year’s biggest movies, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies manages to be just as relentlessly entertaining. Its plot, compared to the former film’s massive superhero showdown, is about a man who sits in rooms with various characters and discusses the minutia of a prisoner swap. How on Earth could that possibly be as fun to watch?
Here’s a movie that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that all you need to get an audience truly invested in a story is great characters. Everything else is just a nice bonus.
In Bridge of Spies, Tom Hanks reunites with Spielberg and plays James B. Donovan, an insurance lawyer asked to step outside his comfort zone and represent a Russian spy captured by the U.S. government. The entire world hates this spy, a man named Rudolf Abel, and by association they’ll despise anyone willing to represent him. But Donovan must do what he believes to be right, in this case defending the seemingly indefensible in spite of what the public thinks of him. Soon, he becomes wrapped up in something much bigger when the CIA attempts to send this spy back to the Soviets in exchange for a captured American pilot.
Rudolf is one of the great movie characters of 2015, played beautifully by Mark Rylance. He’s a kind, soft-spoken man who we can’t help but sympathize with the same way Donovan does, and Rylance neither depicts him as an innocent martyr nor as a despicable enemy. He’s just a dude who happens to find himself on the side opposite to ours, and we come to question what exactly makes him so different from his American counterpart. Both are taking on dangerous missions to obtain intelligence in service of their beliefs, so can we really idolize one but condemn another?
That idea might have been hammered home even further if the American spy was more memorable, but especially when compared to Rudolph, he is bland and instantly forgettable. We do get to spend some amount of time with him, but unlike the rest of the cast, he rarely feels three dimensional.
It shouldn’t be news that Hanks is wonderful in the movie, as a man who wants to uphold the constitution in an age when fear was running rampant and Americans worried their neighbor was the monster from Maple Street. Yet like Rylance, Hanks doesn’t go for the simplistic performance of a nice family man with no flaws who always says exactly the right thing. Donovan is overwhelmed, overworked, and in a nice touch to make him more relatable, suffers from a cold for the last half of the film. We’re always on his side, but in the hands of a lesser director, the story of a brave man standing up for the constitution might come across as schmaltzy. Spielberg instead is constantly aware that these are real people, not exaggerated caricatures meant to represent broad ideas.
A movie with all these concepts might sound like a stuffy drama, but Bridge of Spies moves along at a brisk pace, and extended dialogue sequences have us hanging on every word that threatens to destroy this entire negotiation. The screenplay by Matt Charman and the Coen brothers isn't showy, but it's remarkably efficient like a well oiled machine.
After watching this story unfold for over two hours, the last few minutes do feel a bit rushed, like the Spielberg equivalent of the ending of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. The bridge sequence the movie gets its title from is perfectly paced, but it would have been nice to have just a bit more time after that before leaving the theater. It's a good sign, though, when we want a film this long to just keep going and going.
In the end, despite containing virtually no action, Bridge of Spies is absolutely one of the better Cold War thrillers we've seen at the movies. A few characters could use some more fleshing out, but the two lead performances from Hanks and Rylance are simply masterful, and it all adds up to a touching but not overly sentimental entry in the Spielberg canon.