Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies is a fact-based
espionage drama set during the simmering cold-war Fifties. The film’s main
character, James Donovan (Tom Hanks), is a successful insurance lawyer selected
by his firm to represent Soviet spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), then chosen by
the CIA to negotiate with the Soviet Union and German Democratic Republic an
exchange of Abel for captured U.S. spy-plane pilot Francis Gary Powers (Austin
Stowell). Donovan is a Greatest Generation relic representing an outmoded
ideal. Likewise his journey through mid-century realpolitik is ostensibly
mediated by Spielberg’s mawkish cornball schmaltz. Compared to a zippy
twenty-first century journalism procedural like Spotlight, it is tempting to classify Bridge of Spies as an
enjoyably frivolous bit of throwback prestige—a period piece by a celluloid
filmmaker of diminishing importance in an age of digital reproduction.
And yet Bridge of Spies is an
estimable accomplishment in Spielberg’s body of work. With its deft
storytelling and urgent parallels to the fiery rhetoric of the media in the
summer of Trump, Bridge of Spies is magnificently
self-reflexive. The film continues the director’s meditations within the arena
of the American Argument—the Constitution being, for Donovan, a frame through
which an alert citizenry engages with itself as language and whose borders
fluctuate. The dynamic of the American “frame” resembles the cinematic one. The
title of the film itself suggests seeing as a means of connection across
barriers. Spielberg’s admonition is that we close our eyes at our peril.
Read more at The Point Magazine:
http://thepointmag.com/2015/criticism/bridge-of-spies#footnote-1
Order your copy of Off the Map: Freedom, Control, and the Future in Michael Mann's Public Enemies, from Cascade Books, here.
Order your copy of Off the Map: Freedom, Control, and the Future in Michael Mann's Public Enemies, from Cascade Books, here.