The casting of Tom Hanks as Donovan is crucial in this regard, as Hanks does virtually everything he can to embody the kind of ordinary, homespun, relentlessly decent and forthright persona that made Stewart a shining symbol of American greatness (before Alfred Hitchcock got his hands on him, anyway). His performance follows neatly with his previous three collaborations with Spielberg—Saving Private Ryan (1998), Catch Me If You Can (2002), and The Terminal (2004)—all of which found him playing relatively ordinary, efficient, reliable characters who operate in rather extraordinary circumstances. This is clearly the character-type that Spielberg sees in Hanks, and to his credit Hanks plays it very well, conveying a sense of absolute normality while still suggesting an undercurrent of resolve that most of us could only dream of having.

Bridge of Spies is set primarily against the infamous U-2 incident in 1960, when the Soviet Union shot down an American spy plane in its airspace and captured the pilot, Gary Powers (Austin Stowell). It begins, however, with an incident several years earlier that would prove to be a crucial component of what was to come: the arrest of Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), a seemingly mild-mannered Brooklyn artist who was accused by the U.S. government of being a Soviet spy. Because of his experience prosecuting at the Nuremburg Trials, Donovan was tapped to be Abel’s defense attorney, an assignment that he accepted with some reluctance (he recognized that it might make him as hated as Abel was by the American public). However, he ultimately carried out his duties with great determination, in spite of a trial that was designed to pay lip service to due process—to show the world fair American justice in action—while ensuring a conviction. In this part of the film, Donovan becomes the ultimate spokesman for the Constitution, arguing that Abel’s rights should be respected despite the enormity of the charges against him, which is the first indication of both his tenacity and his absolute honesty. It helps that Abel, played with wonderfully low-key humor by veteran character actor Mark Rylance, emerges as a largely sympathetic character (by the end we like him much more than either the judge or the prosecutors). In this regard Spielberg is able to undercut some of the film’s more strident flag-waving via Donovan’s great character by showing the corruption of the judicial system via its willingness to elevate nationalism over justice.

When the spy plane is shot down and Powers is captured, Donovan is called upon again by Uncle Sam, this time to travel to East Berlin to negotiate the pilot’s release in exchange for Abel, who at this point has been in federal prison for four years. The second half of the film, then, follows Donovan into what can only be described as the Kafkaesque bizarro world behind the Iron Curtain, which Spielberg and long-time cinematographer Janusz Kaminiski depict as a frigid, gray dystopia caught in a perpetual time warp. Destroyed buildings from World War II lie in ruins decades later, gangs of thugs prowl the streets, and there are few if any signs of life, as if all of humanity is holed up inside the decrepit buildings hoping for some kind of liberation. Spielberg has said that the film was born partially out of his fears as a child of the Cold War, but despite constant reminders of what was at stake (Donovan’s son watches the infamous “duck and cover” training film in school and at home obsessively plots the family’s plan during a nuclear attack), the overall sense of Cold War terror never fully materializes. It remains abstract and intellectual, rather than emotional, which is a rare misstep in a Spielberg film. Perhaps it is because he does such a good job of portraying the absurdities of life behind the Iron Curtain that, in retrospect, it makes it hard to think that these buffoons could have ever posed a genuine international threat.

Donovan, with his aw-shucks American demeanor and designer overcoat, is a stranger in a strange land, but because he has already been established as a pillar of integrity and determination, there is little question that he will overcome the tortured bureaucracies of the East Germans and their Soviet overloads, the former embodied by a slick attorney with an agenda named Vogel (Sebastian Koch) and the latter by any number of stiff, uniformed autocrats. Spielberg finds some leavening humor on the wrong side of the wall by playing up the absurdities of communist officiousness and deceit, including a ridiculous group posing as Abel’s family, but he also shows us the very real horrors, including a conveniently witnessed attempt by several people to scale the Berlin Wall that ends in a hail of bullets.

Donovan becomes determined to trade Abel for not just Powers, who the government wants back because of the security risk he poses in being able to spill sensitive information to the Soviets, but also Frederic Pryor, an Ivy League graduate student studying economics who found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and was arrested and detained by the East Germans (the title refers to the Glienicke Bridge connecting Potsdam, East Germany, to West Berlin, where the exchange is to take place). The government is willing to sacrifice Pryor because he poses no real threat to national security, but Donovan isn’t, which allows the film to make a neat distinction between America as embodied by the shadowy government-military complex and America as embodied by its upstanding individuals like Donovan, whose desire to make it home is never impinged by his desire to bring other Americans home with him (he is accused of being a “bleeding heart” on at least one occasion by a CIA operative, but he transcends typical political labels by being a genuine humanist who proclaims in all sincerity that “all people matter”—and then backs it up). If Donovan were a painting, he’d be a Norman Rockwell, which is not surprising given that Spielberg is a devout Rockwell collector who has recreated his imagery before on-screen (most importantly in 1987’s Empire of the Sun).

However, as much as it lionizes Donovan, Bridge of Spies is quite ambivalent about the morality of the spy game in which he is a pawn, as Spielberg often contrasts the images of “us” and “them” in ways that both separate and collapse the two sides. The aforementioned slaughter of East Berliners trying to scale the Berlin Wall is later mirrored almost exactly in a shot of Donovan watching American children doing the same thing while playacting war violence in the safety of their Boston neighborhood. On the flip side, the depiction of the U.S. courtroom is really no better than the Soviet courtroom that convicts Powers; both get the verdict right (finding the men guilty of espionage), but it is obvious that both judicial systems—the backbone of a nation’s morality—are just as guilty of rushing to judgment and denying due process. A kangaroo court is a kangaroo court, whether in New York or Moscow, and if Bridge of Spies has a lasting testament, it is that any moments of heroism in the Cold War were inevitably shrouded by the moral haze that accompanies two nations intent on obliterating each other.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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