Bridge of Spies (2015)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union captures U.S. pilot Francis Gary Powers after shooting down his U-2 spy plane. Sentenced to 10 years in prison, Powers' only hope is New York lawyer James Donovan, recruited by a CIA operative to negotiate his release. Donovan boards a plane to Berlin, hoping to win the young man's freedom through a prisoner exchange. If all goes well, the Russians would get Rudolf Abel, the convicted spy who Donovan defended in court.
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Like many Spielberg movies this harkens to earlier movies, quietly liberal classics like "Judgement at Nuremberg" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" – the idea that everyone deserves justice.
“Bridge of Spies” is rather like a version of “To Kill a Mockingbird” set against the backdrop of McCarthyism, Sputnik and the Bay of Pigs rather than southern racism.
(A revealing reference: Looking for a phone booth in West Berlin, Donovan finds himself in front of a theater that’s playing Billy Wilder’s fast-paced Cold War send-up One, Two, Three.)
Using a screenplay polished and honed by the Coen Brothers, Spielberg dips into John le Carré territory (you can't help but think of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold when Donovan looks onto the newly erected Berlin Wall, in the searchlights, in the snow).
(The dark, dimly lit interiors and exteriors shot by cinematographer Janusz Kaminski could very well translate as the black-and-white world depicted in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.)
Si bien es cierto que los hechos históricos son convincentes, de manera intencional, Spielberg recurre a algunas cuantas pinceladas del thriller de la vieja escuela –principalmente la influencia de The Third Man (1949) y Night Train to Munich (1940), ambos de Carol Reed– para desplegar un relato eficaz y absorbente.
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The script, credited to Matt Chapman and Ethan and Joel Coen, is based on the so-called “Hollow Nickel” case that led to the identification of a KGB cell operating in the U.S. in the mid-fifties (it was previously dramatized in highly abbreviated form in the 1959 James Stewart movie “The FBI Story”).
Not one of the Master of Suspense’s classic thrillers, but the top-heavy international late-career Hitch of “Topaz” and “Torn Curtain.”
Which gets his family shot at and, in one scene right out of Hitchcock’s “Foreign Correspondent,” dodging a mysterious man wielding an umbrella during a heavy downpour.
Not one of the Master of Suspense’s classic thrillers, but the top-heavy international late-career Hitch of “Topaz” and “Torn Curtain.”
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Spielberg's back in even stronger form than he exhibited in "Lincoln," his Cold War thriller with its National Security versus justice and American ideals theme startlingly relevant in a post 9/11 world with the Patriot and Freedom Acts.
But as he did in Lincoln , Spielberg lets any comparison with contemporary politics arise in the viewers’ mind on its own, never signposting the parallels too clearly.
Like Lincoln, Bridge of Spies plays a lively game of hide-and-seek with the American present, sometimes by means of parallels (between the inflamed anti-Communist rhetoric of the late Fifties and the inflamed anti-immigrant/anti-Obama rhetoric of today) and contrasts: neither Donovan nor Abel trumpet, advertise, or “brand” what they do—they simply do it.
However, the inspiration for Bridge of Spies, Spielberg’s latest fable of human conflict carries over from his previous film, Lincoln, more than anything else.
With Bridge of Spies , Spielberg continues the project he started with Lincoln : Using history to illuminate his personal vision of American heroism.
Stewart was bleakly haunted as Scottie in Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), and Peck was dark as Josef Mengele in The Boys from Brazil (1978) and as Ahab in Huston's Moby Dick (1956).