dvd of the week
Steven Spielberg’s by-the-numbers spy suspense film stars Tom Hanks as James Donovan, a respected lawyer who is assigned to defend a Soviet spy in the late 1950s. Despite occasionally violent opposition to his treating Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) as deserving of due process and legal assistance, Donovan soldiers forth, the pinnacle of ethical goodness. When he’s asked to negotiate the trade of Abel for the pilot of a downed U-2 spy plane and a grad student arrested in East Berlin, Donovan must cross the Iron Curtain and uses his wits to do the right thing. The film is impeccably made, taut and beautifully filmed with great performances from Hanks and Rylance. It’s fun, but it’s also easy and a bit obvious, and perhaps not quite worth of being nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards.
