"Bridge of Spies"

Elegant.
That's the word I want to describe Spielberg's "Bridge of Spies."
Film as craft.

As in the way every scene - in its organization, extras, storefronts, clothing, whatever, absolutely recreates a time and place. Yes, it is 1957 again, at least on screen.

And though perhaps a touch stylized from setting to setting, it brings back - in a gripping way - the Cold War, the disastrous flight of Francis Gary Powers' U-2, and the dark mood of a time when nuclear war seemed possible, a time when we still drilled in school against that possibility. We live again in a divided Berlin, see the despair and death at the Wall, watch the potentially deadly (and never-ending) chess game of global power.

But what stays with me tonight is something one hero of the time asks without really using these words, "Who are we?" - meaning what are our true values as Americans?
James Donovan asks because those who chose him to defend the Russian spy Rudolf Abel seem to suggest that the verdict is certain, that the usual rules of American justice need not apply. Yet Donavan defends Abel the spy as he would any defendant, and nearly wins an evidentiary appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, thus upholding enduring values worth far more than the fate of a single spy.

The impulse to fairness, to the right values, comes again when Donavan negotiates the exchange of Abel for Powers, insisting - against the CIA and others in government - that the spy swap also include a young American student imprisoned on the east side of the Wall.

"Who are we?" It's always the important question. Asked another way in a time of every-increasing surveilliance and fear of terror by John le Carré:
“How long can we defend ourselves – you and we - by methods of this kind, and still remain the kind of society that is worth defending?” 

(And a cheer for Tom Hanks as Donovan, and Mark Rylance as Abel. 
Acting as craft....)