Movie review with more aloha than attitude: ‘Bridge of Spies’ provides fantastic ‘Spielbergian’ fare

‘Bridge of Spies’

Showing up for a movie without any prior publicity buzz makes for the best watching experience — expectations are set for pure story telling through innovative visual technique. How creatively will this film dive into clever narrative while twisting and turning audience emotion through complex characters?

What a surprise, then, while watching the credits roll for “Bridge of Spies” to learn finally the director’s name, Steven Spielberg — swiftly explaining the movie’s immense period mis-en-scene, an ambition that always requires the type of Hollywood funding — read: major bucks — he has at his access. “Bridge of Spies” provides fantastic Spielbergian fare: A well-paced story that captivates visually but disappoints in the characters using platitudes to overstate a crucial theme that still applies to modern day global tensions: the “enemy” resembles us with those pesky human needs for family, love, respect, and courage.

Definitely go see this movie. Simply recalibrate the expectations, welcoming a visit to Spielberg’s auteur-land, a visually stunning movie wonderland choreographed by a master, an experience that still feels more on the surface than in the substance of the theme in “Bridge of Spies.”

Score one, however, for intriguing plot as “Bridge of Spies” recounts an amazing historical passage during the Cold War — from 1957 to 1961 — when suspicions in America and the Soviet Union drove so many to question where the next scary traitor would be found, maybe in your own living room. Spies could be everywhere.

Actually, historical settings in movies make for some of the best time travel — that creative game of visual hop-scotch, starting in a family’s New York home then taking the train to an insurance company in Brooklyn, traipsing to Washington D.C. for a Supreme Court appearance, flying U-2 aerial photographing planes 70,000 feet high over the Soviet Union, witnessing pieces of the Berlin Wall built brick-by-brick, standing one snowy night on a German bridge for the exchange — one Russian spy for an American pilot plus a young American student — and, finally, riding the Brooklyn train back to work again. After the long voyage, we come home.

The adventure travels have been with James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks), a quintessential insurance salesman, the type with an advanced vocabulary that never fails his air-tight negotiating logic. Donovan agrees to provide legal counsel to the suspected Russian spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) and, later, negotiates his freedom home to Russia. These two seem diametrically opposite but are cut, in the end, from a similar cloth. Just read Abel’s face — that hapless acceptance, a type of rugged fatalism, and still he has a light spark of hope in the fine arts such as a picture drawing, and listening to music, even more creature comforts like smoking cigarettes. Each man has a family and the passion to live ethically by them.

But as the Russian spy repeats several times from beginning to middle to the end of the film when asked why he shows such little emotion, “Would it help?” And the answer for movie-goers is “yes.”

One sequence of cuts does reveal emotional texture that maybe a family felt while living in 1950s America — soaked in Cold War rhetoric that frightens families into stock piling supplies to prepare for a nuclear attack. An offscreen voice asks the jury to return as a courtroom gavel strikes. Instead, the cut is to a classroom of elementary kids and their wide-eyed teacher loyally uttering the United States pledge of allegiance, everyone placing hands over hearts.

Next the class sits down to watch on a TV screen a documentary showing an atomic bomb dropping; one little girl has tears streaming down her face. The last scene in this sequence shows Donovan’s bathroom where his son has filled the bathtub with fresh water to drink in case they are bombed. On a chair he has spread out a handful of pamphlets explaining the imminent nuclear bombing. Donovan finds him there, disturbed by his son’s unfounded fears.

Small movie moments like these are gripping. Watching from a German train, Donovan grimaces as two youth make a break to climb the Berlin Wall. Tower watch guards shoot them dead. Later as the film ends, Donovan rides the Brooklyn train and stares out the window as a group of unruly youth scuttle up and over a chain fence, only this time nobody shoots. One fence, one wall, one humanity — everyone scrambling in so many familiar similar ways to build safe lives.

‘Woodlawn’

The opening scenes in “Woodlawn” build authentic suspense as to what level of human cruelty “Bombingham” will visit upon its people in late 1960s Birmingham, Ala., a historical time in the United States when citizens intentionally bombed other citizens, intending to kill them. Such civil war — pitting extreme white violence against African Americans — makes going to high school a challenge.

Their school was one of the first to desegregate and change does not come easy to the now mixed-race team as 500 black students attend a school with 1,500 other white students.

What a real surprise given the movie’s swift and poignant opening scenes to experience maybe ten minutes later a shift that sets up the character Hank (Sean Astin) who will now motivate the Woodlawn High School varsity football team to play together as one team, one dream, one way — abandoning Alabama’s entrenched racism.

The short demure man, who walks with a cane, turns out, will lead them all to Jesus, and having found the one way, meaning the Christian faith, will bring this team and even their rival opponents into a game with spiritual contextual messages all around.

This movie experience came as a total surprise — my first foray into the message movie, so that I nearly shuffled to a different theater, returning to the familiar genre of mainstream movies, but decided to stay for the learning curve. What might this movie genre bring?

After all, recently at Regal Keahou Cinemas “The War Room,” also a Christian-themed movie, just finished a well-attended seven-week run. And in January 2016 the film “Repent” will be showing at our local theaters — appearing that “Woodlawn” and others in this message movie genre might have crossover appeal here in Kona.

Ultimately, the film does work to portray good people living in painfully troubled times who now have a chance to choose how to react. Good old-fashioned anger won’t work. Seeking solace in the invisible world of faith is a tall challenge for everyone. Yet many characters in “Woodlawn” artfully portray the transformation.

Sure, the music pounds at just those emotional moments when the football game is on. And female characters only make opportune appearances — as cartoon figure wives and a victimized youth who eventually becomes the girlfriend to the film’s central sports hero Tony Nathan (Caleb Castille).

Even so, consider seeing the film to jump start conversation on how living the spiritual life makes anyone alternatively inspired and vulnerable—leaving room for so many paths, rather than just one way, to the motivating courage discovered there.