Steven Spielberg's Cold War legal drama starring Tom Hanks. Coen brothers screenplay. The Glienicke Bridge prisoner exchange.
New York, 1957. James B. Donovan, an insurance lawyer in Brooklyn, is approached by the federal bar association to provide legal representation to Rudolf Abel, a Soviet KGB officer captured in New York. The case is widely understood to be a public-relations exercise — Abel will be convicted regardless of his lawyer's competence — but Donovan takes the defence seriously, including arguing constitutional protections that prevent Abel from receiving the death penalty. The trial concludes with Abel's conviction; Donovan's argument prevents the death sentence.
Five years later, the U-2 incident: American pilot Francis Gary Powers is shot down over Soviet airspace. CIA representatives approach Donovan with an unofficial proposal: Donovan should travel to East Berlin and negotiate a prisoner exchange — Abel for Powers. The complication is that the East Germans have separately captured American economics student Frederic Pryor, whom the CIA does not officially want included in the negotiation. Donovan, operating without official U.S. government cover, insists on a two-for-one exchange that includes Pryor. The film closes with the actual February 1962 Glienicke Bridge exchange of Abel for Powers, with Pryor released through the Checkpoint Charlie border crossing on Donovan's separate negotiation.
The screenplay for Bridge of Spies was written primarily by Matt Charman (the British playwright who developed the project originally) with significant uncredited revision by Joel and Ethan Coen. The Coen brothers' specific working contribution was the dialogue — particularly the verbal repartee between Donovan and Rudolf Abel, the legal-argument speeches Donovan delivers in court, and the closing scenes after the Glienicke Bridge exchange.
The Coens' contribution gives the film a specific tonal register that distinguishes it from most Spielberg historical dramas. The dialogue has a deadpan-Coens quality that the Spielberg-Kushner historical-drama register (Lincoln, Munich) does not contain. The 'standing man' speech Donovan delivers to the CIA agent — about the structural significance of refusing to abandon constitutional procedures even under pressure — is recognisably a Coens speech in its specific verbal rhythm. The unusual director-screenwriter collaboration produced a film whose tonal register is, in some sense, neither fully Spielberg nor fully Coens but a specific hybrid.
Mark Rylance won Best Supporting Actor at the 2016 Academy Awards for his performance as Rudolf Abel. The role is structurally small — Abel appears in approximately forty minutes of screen time across the film — but the performance is, by general critical consensus, the film's most-distinctive single element.
What Rylance accomplishes is the depiction of Abel as a man of unmistakable interior dignity. The character is not, in the film's framing, sympathetic in the conventional sense (he is, after all, a Soviet spy whose work has cost American lives). But the performance refuses the conventional villainous-Soviet register and instead presents Abel as a person operating within his own coherent moral and professional framework. Rylance's specific physical and vocal comportment — the slightly hunched posture, the quiet voice, the recurring small joke about whether he would 'stand for what good would it do' — produces a portrait of human dignity that the film's broader Cold War political framework does not predict.
Bridge of Spies's structural argument is, in some sense, that the rule of law requires defending unpopular defendants with the same procedural seriousness that popular defendants receive. The film makes this argument repeatedly — through Donovan's trial-defence work, through his subsequent prisoner-exchange negotiation, through the closing scenes that confirm Donovan's broader career commitment to constitutional procedure.
What's structurally significant is that the film makes the argument without resolving the surrounding political questions. The film does not, for example, argue that the broader Cold War was justified or unjustified. It does not engage the question of whether Abel's espionage produced specific U.S. harms. It does not address the broader CIA-vs-KGB symmetry. The film's narrower argument is purely about procedural law — that the constitutional protections must be applied uniformly, that defendants are entitled to genuine legal representation regardless of public sentiment. The argument is, in 2015 commercial cinema, structurally unusual; very few major-studio films attempt this kind of contained legal-philosophy argument at length.