Movie review: ‘Bridge of Spies’

In an age when international refugee crises more or less unfold live on Twitter, and back-room governmental dealings are dumped into the daylight by digitally savvy whistleblowers, Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies seems positively quaint.

Not that the tale Spielberg and his collaborators have to tell is dull, by any stretch.

The fact-based drama concerns a tense, paranoid period in the early 1960s, as the United States and the then-Soviet Union engaged in diplomatic and military brinksmanship, each country daring the other to step over the line and into World War III.

But for all Spielberg, his star-packed cast, led by Tom Hanks, and his on-screen and off-screen team (Joel and Ethan Coen co-wrote the screenplay) bring to the table, Bridge of Spies is remarkable only for how stuffy and surprisingly inert the film becomes.

Despite the parallels Spielberg teases out between then and now — allusions to government sanctioned torture, for instance — Spies never truly springs to life.

The film opens with the arrest and detainment of suspected Soviet spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), whose bemused reactions to his ongoing plight is Spies’ most singular pleasure. (When told he seems unworried by his circumstances: “Would it help?” he asks, the marvelous, verbal equivalent of a shrug.)

While Abel’s being held in America, U.S. pilot Francis Gary Powers (played by the blandly handsome Austin Stowell), manning a spy plane for the C.I.A. on a covert mission, is shot down and captured by the Soviets, further raising the stakes. The idea of trading captives is floated by senior government officials, necessitating the enlistment of a patriotic lawyer, James Donovan (Tom Hanks), to facilitate Abel’s delivery and Powers’ release.

Donovan, along with the audience, is plunged into a world of mysterious alliances, shifting intentions and uncertain loyalties, placing him in the midst of fraught negotiations, which are further complicated when an American student, Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers), is also captured by the Germans, a country undergoing some seismic Cold War changes of its own as it builds the Berlin Wall.

Hanks brings his capable everyman quality to the role of Donovan, sniffling his way through snow-blown Berlin and never letting the pressure of the situation get to him.

He’s surrounded by a constellation of terrific character actors — Alan Alda plays Donovan’s stern boss; Amy Ryan is his suffering-in-silence wife, Mary; Sebastian Koch is Wolfgang Vogel, a shadowy German go-between — although none of them have much to sink their teeth into.

That said, Joel and Ethan Coen, who co-wrote the screenplay with Matt Charman, don’t expend much energy wondering about the European lives being affected, apart from Abel, although even he ends up being a cipher.

With espionage television dramas like The Americans, Deutschland 83 and Homeland deftly mining the world of spies for potent dramatic narratives, it’s disappointing Bridge of Spies can’t find the same spark in its nonfictional inspiration.

This story was originally published October 13, 2015 at 1:13 PM with the headline "Movie review: ‘Bridge of Spies’."