Something for Your Weekend | Recommended Spy Film to Watch
Ujasusi Originals
🎬 This Week’s Pick: Bridge of Spies (2015)
Steven Spielberg · Touchstone / DreamWorks · 141 minutes Where to watch (UK)
Why this film
Some spy films are about the chase. This one is about the conversation. Steven Spielberg directs, the Coen brothers polished the script, Tom Hanks plays a Brooklyn lawyer in over his head, and Mark Rylance plays a captured Soviet agent with such quiet dignity that he walked away with the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. It is the rare espionage picture that works equally well for someone who has never thought twice about how spies operate and someone who thinks about it for a living.
The story, without spoilers
It is 1957. The FBI arrests a man living quietly in Brooklyn — an artist, a neighbour, a face nobody noticed. He turns out to be a Soviet spy of the highest rank, the kind that lives abroad for years under a false identity with no embassy to protect him if he is caught.
A New York insurance lawyer named James Donovan is asked to defend him. Everyone — the courts, the press, the public — expects Donovan to go through the motions and let the man hang. Donovan refuses. He believes that even an enemy officer deserves a proper defence, and he argues, against the mood of the country, that this particular prisoner should be kept alive. He may be useful one day, Donovan says.
Three years later, an American spy plane is shot down over the Soviet Union. The pilot survives. Suddenly, Donovan’s argument looks less like idealism and more like foresight. The CIA quietly asks him to fly to a divided Berlin and make a trade. He goes with no badge, no diplomatic protection, and a head cold — and finds that the negotiation is far more complicated than anyone in Washington has told him.
The rest of the film unfolds on and around the Glienicke Bridge, the lonely crossing between East and West that became one of the Cold War’s most famous landmarks for prisoner exchanges. What happens there is best discovered by watching.
What makes it special
The film slows down where most spy thrillers speed up. The opening twenty minutes follow the Soviet agent through an ordinary day in Brooklyn — painting, walking, riding the subway, picking up something from underneath a park bench — and you slowly realise you have been watching a professional at work the whole time. Nothing is explained. You notice.
Rylance gives the captured agent a calm, slightly amused dignity. Three times in the film, when someone asks if he is worried, he replies the same way: “Would it help?” The line has become one of the most quoted in modern cinema, and it captures something true about how serious people behave under pressure — not just spies.
Hanks plays Donovan as a stubborn, slightly rumpled professional who keeps doing the right thing for unfashionable reasons. The two actors barely raise their voices throughout the film, and the picture is all the more tense for it.
Why it matters for the rest of us
Beneath the period detail, Bridge of Spies is asking a question that never goes out of date: how should a country treat the people it captures? The film’s answer, channelled through Donovan, is that the way you handle your prisoners says more about you than about them — and that the temptation to humiliate a captured opponent almost always costs you more than it gains.
That is a lesson with obvious relevance to many parts of the world today, including those this newsletter covers most closely. But the film never preaches. It simply lets a quiet lawyer make his case, scene by scene, until you find yourself agreeing with him.
One last thing
Pour something decent. Settle in. The film takes its time, and it should be allowed to.
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