Bridge of Spies

Steven Spielberg ties the suspense to a bargaining condition, not a weapon: Donovan insists on two men for one, holding out for the student Pryor alongside the pilot Powers. The second half turns on that refusal; the climax is two men walking across a bridge. The argument arrives through two train windows: boys climbing a fence in New York, people shot climbing the wall in Berlin. Abel’s repeated question, whether worrying would help, does the work a score usually does. The screenplay came out of a footnote: Matt Charman spotted Donovan in a book about Kennedy and met the lawyer’s son. The Coen brothers revised it, and Mark Rylance compared the two drafts to the first and second quartos of Hamlet. The exchange was shot on the Glienicke Bridge where the 1962 swap happened; the wall going up was built in Wrocław, Poland. John Williams withdrew over a health problem, so Thomas Newman scored it, one of the few Spielberg films without him. The real Pryor was on holiday in Denmark while the wall rose, detained only after returning. A good fit if a name added to a list is hook enough and a climax made of walking. Not a fit if you want Pryor’s ordeal told as it actually went; the film compresses it into the wall sequence.