"Bridge of Spies" Review

Bridge of Spies is a Cold War espionage thriller film directed by legendary filmmaker Steven Spielberg and starring legendary actor Tom Hanks, with Mark Rylance, Amy Ryan, Alan Alda, and Billy Magnussen in supporting roles. The film follows Hanks's character James B. Donovan, an insurance lawyer, who is chosen to represent Rudolf Abel, who is under arrest for suspicion of espionage from the Soviet Union. During this, Donovan undergoes backlash from the American people for being a "traitor" to the nation by representing a spy, and devises a plan to make momentary peace with the USSR by trading Abel for an American pilot being kept as a Soviet prisoner of war after his plane is shot down over Russian territory.

Let me first address the primary criticism I've heard regarding this movie: that it's boring. I can sort of sympathize with this, though I don't agree with it. At two and a half hours, this movie has a lot of story to tell, and the "thriller" label might throw some people off in terms of how little action goes on. This movie is primarily talking, and the scenes which carry the best cinematic tension are few and far between. But man, if those two dynamics aren't constructed well.

There's a reason Spielberg has such a storied career. Keep in mind Spielberg is very often not a writer - he doesn't come up with the stories and characters in his films that have resonated so deeply in culture, but he is a big part of the reason why they do. This is because Spielberg is truly a master of his craft, to the point that even his "bad" movies are at the very least competently made motion pictures. With the exceptions of the fourth Indiana Jones film and The Adventures of Tintin, the last decade or so of Spielberg cinema has been dark, thoughtful, "adult" movies, mostly dealing with politics or history - or often both. The great thing about Spielberg is he manages to sew entertainment and masterful filmmaking into both his big blockbuster features and his more contemplative works, and Bridge of Spies, while not the best ever, is a very good example of that quality.

Bridge of Spies is very "old Hollywood", both in premise and execution. The Cold War spy thriller is a more milked subgenre that most might expect because we don't see a whole lot of them nowadays. In fact, the only truly old-school spy movies of late that have come out are the James Bond sequels. Bridge of Spies is a time machine back to the spy thrillers of old. No explosions or shootouts to be found here (okay, there's a few of the latter), but well-written dialogue, character development, and carefully built tension. All of this is topped off by Oscar-worthy performances by Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance. Rylance is the one getting more of the Oscar talk, but I think Hanks is still the show-stealer. Bridge of Spies convinced me that Tom Hanks is the modern day Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart. His performance, along with the style of the movie, feel like they're straight out of the very best of 1960s and 70s Hollywood.

In the wrong hands, the story of this film (which I'm only not talking much about because it's fairly straightforward and what you'd expect) could have been truly sleep-inducing. Luckily, the reliably beautiful camerawork of Janusz Kaminski and great score by composer living legend Thomas Newman, coupled with Spielberg's near-peerless attention to detail make this film, as a movie fan and a Spielberg fan, a joy to watch. The tone, the music, the likable and believable characters, the camerawork, the set design, the period, the patriotic-without-being-jingoistic message - it all just screams classic Spielberg, and as a movie fan, even if this movie doesn't even top his ten best films (it's really not even close), there's still a tiny but noticeable thrill when you see it play out. The best way I can put it is that we've heard this song be played many times before, but Spielberg is able to conduct his orchestra to make it sound so beautiful that we want to come back every time.

I took my parents to see Bridge of Spies while they visited me for a weekend at college, and in my opinion that's a great way to see this movie. It really shows the generation-crossing appeal Spielberg (and Hanks, for that matter) have. After the movie ended, my mom and dad told all kinds of stories of seeing Jaws and Close Encounters and all those Spielberg classics in the movie theater. Like most of his films, Bridge of Spies is the nicest form of a "blast from the past" as you'll get.

Overall, Bridge of Spies is a predictable, slow-burning, old-school spy thriller that may not appeal to all of today's audiences, who may not find it all that exciting (although the U2 plane shootdown sequence is one of the most terrifying things I've seen in theaters this year), but it's a beautifully shot, superbly acted, and very well directed film that might not match but will definitely remind you of the best days of Steven Spielberg. And it's got a great Tom Hanks performance, who may be the most watchable human being on the planet.

Grade: A-