‘Bridge of Spies’ taut, old-fashioned tale

It’s brilliant, really. What’s the quickest way to establish the humanity of two leading characters in a Cold War drama? Give them both the sniffles.

“Bridge of Spies” does that, and more. The film is an anomaly — a confident, slightly square, highly satisfying example of old-school Hollywood craftsmanship, starring a major movie star brandishing a briefcase, and a handkerchief, rather than a pistol.

The trailers for director Steven Spielberg’s first film since the 2012 “Lincoln” aren’t quite telling the truth. They promise a ridiculous degree of screw-tightening suspense amid imminent global destruction. The movie’s narrative (more or less true) contains those elements, but sparingly. It’s closer to John le Carre than to Tom Clancy. Some moviegoers at a recent sneak preview seemed thrown by the rhythm of the thing, its devotion to steady, sure-footed storytelling. It’s best to know going in that this isn’t “Argo,” entertaining as that film was, culminating in bad guys running around tarmacs with machine guns.

On the other hand, Spielberg has no interest in making a documentary. He’s in love with the ravishing fakery of the movies he watched as a kid, the ones he went on to re-investigate decades later as a great American filmmaker. Adapted freely from the historical record, like any good fact-based but not fact-bound docudrama, “Bridge of Spies” honors the righteous underdog, triumphant.

Tom Hanks stars as James Donovan, a Brooklyn, N.Y., insurance claims lawyer and former Nuremberg trials prosecutor. Not that many knew about it at the time, but Donovan negotiated a tricky exchange of Soviet and American spies: KGB mole Rudolf Abel (born Vilyam Genrikhovich Fisher), captured in New York in 1957, as a trade for the U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers, shot down over the USSR in 1960 and captured.

On his own initiative, Donovan rolled a third man into the trade. American doctoral candidate Frederic Pryor was picked up and detained on the hostile side of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Two Americans, Powers and the forgotten Pryor, for Abel: Could the right negotiator pull off such a lopsided trade? “Bridge of Spies,” which takes its title from the Glienicke Bridge linking West Berlin with Potsdam, answers that question in due course.

Not long after the swap occurred in the 1960s, a movie based on the little-noted event reached the screenplay stage. Gregory Peck was mentioned as Donovan, opposite Alec Guinness as Abel. We can imagine the outcome. Peck’s gravely righteous aura made him a kind of extra-super-mega-American stalwart and, in the wrong hands, or the wrong project, a bit of a pill.

Hanks is a different story. Like everything about Spielberg’s “Bridge of Spies,” Hanks’ performance makes relaxed professionalism and genial decency look easy. The role is what it is: an exemplar of homespun virtues, an Everyman with a patient, stalwart wife (Amy Ryan, reliably fine, though a scene or two more would’ve helped) and kids more concerned about ducking and covering and a Russian invasion than their dad’s clandestine whereabouts once the Berlin affair gets underway. Donovan is not larger than life; he’s an ordinary hero with the sniffles, Capraesque to the core if Capra had ever made a Cold War spy picture. At one point, Donovan refers to himself, Powers and Abel as the three most hated men in America. The second Hanks says it, you can feel the crowd thinking as one: Naaaah.

Because he’s relatively new to multiplex audiences, Mark Rylance will likely walk off with the acting honors for “Bridge of Spies.” He looks nothing like the real Abel, but in a largely nonverbal, supremely poker-faced performance — even his stuffy nose is subtle — Rylance suggests a forlorn practitioner of deception who recognizes a lucky break when he sees it. His luck is Donovan, a man tasked with defending the rights of a Soviet agent (albeit a fairly ineffective one) at an especially nervous and jingoistic time in American history. Such times have a way of cycling back around. To the degree that “Bridge of Spies” can be characterized as championing a cause beyond freedom and the hardy U.S. Constitution, it argues implicitly for humane treatment of prisoners, both foreign and domestic. It’s a sound business approach, geopolitically speaking.