The one pleasure that carries all the way through Bridge of Spies is its lush appropriation of espionage noir cinematography. Full foregrounds catch the eye to lead it deep into the back of the frame, and low camera angles pair with low key lighting to suggest to us what noir might have looked like in muted color. Even sets like that of the bridge, with its oddly unnatural light and its simulated snow, have the artificial quality that noir sets embraced. And weaving through this beauty is Spielberg’s elegant, modern camera. And jump cuts keep us attentive to what’s on the screen by popping us between storylines and characters. Bridge of Spies is a beautiful, engaging film to watch.
And it starts out with an equally strong narrative. In the movie’s 1957 America, the US distinguishes itself from the Soviet Union by emphasizing the rights of individuals as guaranteed in the constitution. However, the first half of Bridge of Spies shows patriots who want to fight the Soviets by, ironically, compromising the very constitutional rights they maintain as essential to America. Through the court procedural that is the first half of the film, the all-American Tom Hanks, as James Donovan, pursues justice for an accused Soviet spy, Rudolf Abel, through the court system. But Donovan’s pursuit comes in opposition to sympathetic characters, like the Judge and even Donovan’s own family, who are ironically ready to throw away Abel’s legal rights in order to oppose the Soviets. The first half of Bridge of Spies dramatizes this complex irony – trampling on an individual’s legal rights in order to protect those very same rights -- in a deft, affective way that certainly glances at some of the personal privacy issues America is facing today. Bridge of Spies is not the first time a Spielberg film has used to past to comment on the present – Munich looks at how an obsession with fighting terrorism can undermine the very values that the fight means to protect. The first half of Bridge of Spies works especially well because of the way it looks as well as the way it handles this complex issue.
If the film had developed its interest in this question, it could have been a unique, important movie. Unfortunately, it drops this subject in the middle and moves into a reboot of a Cold War thriller with a deprived Soviet bloc, oppressive Communist leaders, an oppressed Eastern population, and spies on both sides that don’t inspire trust. There’s even a painfully obvious parallel between a grey scene of East Germans being machine-gunned as they try to scale the Berlin wall and a color scene of kids playing in New York City scaling a tall fence. Such an obvious pairing of scenes might well be a nod to the style of the period; there are similar paired scenes when people on the NYC subway frown at Donovan when he defends Abel but later smile when he negotiates a hostage release. But echoes of a Cold War style or not, these elements move Bridge of Spies away from the interesting ideas of the first half into one where the West is good, the East is bad, and the humanity individuals can span this gap. The cliché at the heart of the second half of this film deflates the tension and, concurrently, our interest flags.
Bridge of Spies is half a great movie, but its visual beauty can help us overlook some of the comfortable triteness of its second half.
