Bridge of Spies – 7

A Spielbergian look at a Cold War incident, replete with recitations of the Constitution and what it means to be an American. Who better to present the message than uber-vanilla-good guy Tom Hanks, who, alas, seemed very unlikely as a tough-lawyer negotiator. Not only was I not convinced that his character could have pulled off the deal, I was totally unbelieving that he would have upped the stakes – to extricate a second American hostage – on his own. His ploy to accomplish this latter struck me, further, as double-dealing quite inconsistent with his Mr. All-America image. As expected from Spielberg, subtlety was missing: a shot of Brooklyn youths leaping backyard fences, for instance, over-obviously echoed a previous scene of East Berliners being gunned down as they tried to scale the Wall. Mark Rylance did what he could, creating an interesting character out of Rudolf Abel, but all around him were one-dimensional figures, much as we saw in Lincoln.