Bridge of Spies

Worried but smiling, Mary Donovan sees her husband off on his secret mission to East Berlin: “Can’t you give me something to go on? I don’t even care if it’s not true.” As the stay at home, perky wife, Mary doesn’t have much role in the action — but that line strikes to the heart of Stephen Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies. As insurance lawyer James Donovan learns when he’s introduced to the web of lies woven by the Russian, American and East German governments, everyone indulges each other’s fictions.

When Donovan negotiates the exchange of Russian spy Rudolf Abel for the U2 pilot Gary Powers and a hapless American economics student taken prisoner in East Berlin, he finds layer upon layer of fiction. All the agents lie and hide. Actors are presented as Abel’s family. The lawyer Vogel proves a rare bird, elusive in flight and of ambiguous power and role when finally spotted. Nobody is who they seem to be. 

The CIA enlists Donovan as negotiator because the swap is too touchy for governments to negotiate. Only Donovan refuses to lie. Mary doesn’t believe his cover — the company sending him to Europe for clients — but even to assuage her fears all he says is “I’m doing this for us.” They go through the marmalade game to buttress her confidence. 

The Communists don’t believe his true story, that he’s not an American agent. In the plague of duplicity in both houses, only Donovan tells the truth. He confounds the US agents when he escapes their script to insist the American student be included in the swap. Because that one man stuck to his values, to the American principles of justice, the fictions worked out to a happy ending.  

The metaphor extends even further. When Donovan defends the Russian spy, when he enforces the Americans’ guarantee of justice, he offends all America. Vigilante citizens shoot up Donovan’s home. A cop turns against him, preferring to persecute rather than to protect him. The lawyers and judge want to present just the appearance of a fair trial — precisely what we disdain in the Russian autocracy. Donovan is totally invested in the moral principles of US justice, which the other lawyers, the judge and the embittered frightened citizens are all too willing to scuttle. Only by appealing to the judge’s self-interest does Donovan manage to avoid his client’s death sentence. The Golden Rule fails Donovan: Shouldn’t we treat their spies as we would want them to treat ours? He wins by foreseeing the possibility of using Abel for an exchange the next time Russia catches an American spy. Pragmatism trumps principle. 

Add Tom Hanks’s James Donovan to the pantheon of American righteousness, the rugged individual who stands up against the world for his principles. He ranks with Henry Fonda’s Lincoln, James Stewart’s Messieurs Smith and Deeds, Gary Cooper’s Sergeant York and Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch. They all embody what the Russian spy Abel admires as “the standing man,” a character so strong of will and ideals that he stands by them whatever the cost and challenge. After the swap Donovan appears standing still solid — but dwarfed by the machinery of the bridge that looms black and impersonal over him. When he finally collapses on his bed at home, exhausted, he’s still in that standing pose, though splayed out horizontal.   

Obviously the film is about the 1957 episode in the Cold War. The period is richly realized, down to the films on the West Berlin marquee: Billy Wilder’s satire of Coca Cola colonialism in Berlin, One Two Three (1961), Kubrick’s film (script by blacklisted Dalton Trumbo) about the freedom fighting Roman slave, Spartacus (1960), and the parable of an alien-threatened (Commie?) community, Village of the Damned. (1960). The film dates cohere with the dates of Powers’ capture and release. 

The political chill of the Cold War permeates the West, as we see in the school kids’ oath of allegiance and Duck and Cover drill, and in the sniffly cold that starts with Abel, overwhelms Donovan when a German gang steals his Saks Fifth Avenue overcoat, and passes on to the CIA agent. The white hanky signifies the characters’ surrender to the era’s paranoia, cruelty and abandonment of American values.

That’s what makes this film about now as much as then. The film addresses the current threat, America abandoning its values in their supposed defence against a monster enemy, whether their Communism or our current bogey, radical Islam.  “There’s no book of rules,” the CIA agent tells Donovan, attempting to violate the client-lawyer relationship. There is, Donovan reminds him — the constitution. 

Of course, the Supreme Court is split down the middle on what the constitution was intended to advance. But the principles of freedom, justice, protection of the individual, should guard against the system’s corrupt pragmatism. That’s the gist of Donovan’s terse but resonant address to the Supreme Court. His appeal fails on the familiar 5-4 count. Bridge of Spies reminds us all of what distinguished America and made her a beacon for humanity worldwide. It also warns us how easy it is to abandon those values in the name of defending them. (Hello Republican candidates.)

The film’s excellence lies equally in its message and in the subtlety of its presentation. Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance are brilliant in the interiority of their expression. Both feel and express more than they say. 

On the train home Donovan shows a flicker of disturbance when he sees American teenagers playfully leaping over backyard high wire fences. He’s remembering the young people shot dead trying to leap the Berlin Wall? He’s remembering his close call when he was threatened and robbed by the East Berliners? He sees the spectre of the fascist society in America? We’re reminded that however great our social and political differences, we and our enemies are equally tempted to abandon our values for expediency. That’s when we indulge our own fictions, which is even more dangerous than indulging each other's.