Dear Write Readers, this is it!
This is the very last film that I’ll be writing about which is nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture! It’s been a intense experience of film watching, and our last film is certainly not the least. Bridge of Spies is directed by none other than the illustrious Steven Spielberg. It stars Tom Hanks, Mark Rylance, Amy Ryan, and Alan Alda. It’s based on true events from 1960, and is nominated for six Academy Awards. The nominations include Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Rylance), and Best Original Screenplay (finally, an original screenplay). 
Let’s spoil away.
Bridge of Spies is a film based on the 1960 U-2 incident during the Cold War. If you’re like me and you had to look it up, instead let me tell you about it. In 1957, a bunch of FBI agents bust a Soviet spy, and although they don’t really follow things like due process and what not, they arrest him. Lawyer James B. Donovan (Hanks) is assigned to defend Rudolf Abel (Rylance). Although everyone else thinks that Donivan is simply paying lip service to this defense, but being the good lawyer he are, he actually cares about things like justice, and “doing what’s right.” Everyone else, naturally, dislikes him for this trait, and thinks he’s a traitor to his country. He gets a lot of dirty looks from random individuals on trains, and shots are fired at his house. And yet, he does his job well and so Abel is found guilty but not killed. At the same time, the CIA is training spy pilots to fly spy planes over the USSR to get super secret spy information. Naturally, because obviously, this super spy pilot named Francis Powers (Austin Stowell) gets shot down over the Soviet Union, and captured. He is convicted and interrogated. The USSR proposes a prisoner exchange, which is something our fantastic and thorough lawyer Donovan actually mentioned and anticipated, because he’s a smart guy. Since the USSR doesn’t actually admit that Abel is their spy, they decide to have the meeting in East Germany, and the American government sends Donovan to go handle the whole thing, because clearly they don’t have any lawyers employed anywhere in Capitol Hill.
Donovan gets to East Berlin and while all of this happens, some random American Econ grad student named Pryor goes to visit his girlfriend in East Berlin (really now?) but on the way back he gets arrested as an American spy. So when Donovan gets to Berlin (his wife thinks he’s on a fishing trip) he negotiates for the release of not one but two individuals. A bunch of political stuff happens, and no one really wants to give up everything that the Americans want, and we discover that the USSR and GDR (German Democratic Republic) don’t actually play well with others or want the same things. It’s complicated, and no one really wants to give anything up, but eventually they all agree and figure it out, and everyone gets to go home, including Donovan. And when he gets home and goes to bed, his wife and kids find out that he’s actually been making history.
Now that the spoilers are over, what’s great about this film? Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks is great about this film. Surprisingly enough, Tom Hanks is great in almost every film he’s ever done. I don’t know of a film in which Hanks hasn’t been great in, and so it kind of goes without saying. Except for the fact that I review films so I have to say those things. So I’m going to keep saying it. Hanks has made seemingly millions of movies in his career, each better than the next, and this film is no exception. Hanks does excellent work. The sleeper, however, is Mark Rylance, and there’s a reason he’s been nominated for Best Supporting. I’m still rooting for Ruffalo, but definitely Rylance deserves to be honored for the work he’s done on this film. He’s quiet, not flashy, not overly dramatic, but simply honest. You don’t want to feel for a Soviet spy, but we do because Rylance reminds us that no matter which countries we come from we’re all trying to do the same thing. We’re all trying to do our jobs, and to support our best interests and the things that we believe in. And Donovan’s ability to see Abel’s humanity makes Abel more able to be beautifully human on screen.
This film is excellently directed and written, and has that super old school 50’s feel about it. It doesn’t really feel like a 2015 movie trying to live in the 50’s, it feels as though this film has been brought through time into this moment in order to tell these modern audiences about the stories of the McCarthy era. I would highly recommend bringing in this film to any kind of U.S. History or Social Studies class, not just because of the Cold War content but because the costumes, screenplay, sound, and everything else all make us feel so very 1950. We can so easily see how the system has changed from today, and how it’s different from before the war. The innocence is gone. In this post war culture, we’re not just protecting our nation, we’re protecting our schools, or families, our very way of life. The red scare deeply permeated every piece of our country, and we thought the Russians were coming at us from every angle. It was truly a cultural phenomenon not unlike the current political climate in which anything liberal is feared as being socialist. We see it deeply in Donovan’s son telling his father about how they’ll prepare the house for when the Russians come to bomb everyone and everything. There is so very much fear.
I don’t know how this film will fare against some of the other choices, mainly Revenant. It’s pretty hard to come up against a movie like that. It’s well done, as they all are, but I don’t know that a strong 50’s vibe is enough.
Thanks for reading and watching along with me, Write Readers. Enjoy the Academy Awards! Hopefully any of my predictions come true.
Live, Love, Learn,
Rebecca &