Art is not a mirror held up to reality
but a hammer with which to shape it.-Bertolt Brecht
Steven Spielberg’s latest Bridge of Spies : there are many films out there about cold war conspiracy that indeed may more enthrall in different ways than Bridge of Spies. What Spielberg offers in his consummate way is an unbeatable Hollywood director asking questions retrospectively that one feels he’s asking about the world today.
Unless you’ve lived in America you’d never comprehend the indoctrination of nationhood (is that jingoism) into the DNA of its citizens. There are passages in Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism that just can’t be true, but regrettably are indeed. You do not want to be an outsider in America. It is the golden land of the insider. Drink, drink and drink some more. Being rich in the prohibition days clearly had advantages. So much for ‘democracy’ and the ‘rule of law’. Irony (is that the word?) that many if not most of America's greatest most 'revered' movies are about outsiders...
James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks) in Bridge of Spies is a typical rare breed of American who believes in the rule of law/justice. In 1957 he’s asked to defend Russian spy Rudolf Abel – rather a pat on the back assignment: do me a favor give him due legal process he’s guilty anyways but we need to be seen to be just. What Donovan’s peers don’t count on is that he takes his job just that bit too seriously- really trying to give Abel a fair trial. Nothing surprises in this consummately constructed movie. What Spielberg does (and oftentimes always has) is get the audience to surprise itself. To question where and who they are. Moreover what Spielberg really does well is cast actors- whether it is happenstance or premedicated, the result is always nothing short of brilliant. Here we have Tom Hanks giving one of his best performances (again perhaps like Spielberg, Hanks is questioning where and what we all are nowadays). Like his client Abel (Mark Rylance) he doesn’t seem to sense fear. He’s way out of his depth with both the Russians and the CIA and yet he’s an fffing great swimmer- only he just didn’t know it. What he does know is that swimming is sort of his thing. Weirdly.
Mark Rylance’s dour non-descript Abel (though the paintings he does in his off-time as a spy are naturalistic) is something out of Francis Bacon’s ‘wheel of fire’ world: Shakespeare's King Lear : But I am bound upon a wheel of fire, / That mine own tears do scald like molten lead. Irony that Bacon’s Study for the Nurse in the Battleship Potemkin was painted also in 1957.
It is amazing (or perhaps not, if one knows America) that it took a British screenwriter and playwright Matt Charman to bring this story to the world’s attention (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen then honed the script with Chapman). It wasn’t until American families saw first-hand their sons and daughters come home in body bags during the last decade that anyone doubted what war America was fighting. Similarly, it’s hard to think that many smart folk wouldn’t see this movie and start thinking again about what the hell is going on around them in the world. Abel clearly is a “good soldier”- he is indeed fighting for a cause (as indeed were Americans) “стоящего, стоящего” the standing man. (Abel as a boy, saw a man beaten, but then the man stood up again. They hit him harder, but he stood up again. Finally, the leader called the beating off and called the man, Stoyashchego). It takes an extremely deft creative team to make all this into the drôle rather than morbid Bridge of Spies.
The unbearable sadness of it all is that while there are winners and losers to these ‘wars’ there will always be more victims. And more victims. And more. Just restored in a director's cut is a shining testament to ordinary people (Berlin) who end up on the wrong side of war: Helma Sanders-Brahms’ Deutschland bleiche Mutter (Germany, Pale Mother). (Russian site) Lene conquers every obstacle with her daughter before and through WW2 whilst her husband fights on the German front. The war ends and normal life fights on. He never ever cheated on her (we believe) nor her ever on him (except for being raped by two American liberating soldiers) but still he hits her in disbelief. And still she stands. In the film’s final scene Lene (her face having become half-paralysed in peace time-due to disbelief?) locks herself in the bathroom attempting suicide by gas; her daughter cries and beats incessantly on the door pleading for her to come out. Lene finally unlocks the door-voice-over: "It was a long time before Lene opened the door, and sometimes I think she is still behind it, and I am still standing in front of it, and that she will never come out again, and I have to be grown up and alone. But she is still here. Lene is still here."
It’s ever so scary how many many films that aren’t of any present can be so prescient. Alas: America (and ..) has only ever really championed the victors (so so many even more talented/tenacious go the 'Room 101'). Christian Petzold’s Phoenix is a world emotionally away from Sanders-Brahms. An intellectual cinematic construct that, in its own way, has you thinking beyond film (as with Sanders-Brahms). Every Petzold film is a construct. Therein lies the frustration and the fascination. Why did both distributors either side of the ‘pond’ release the film this year in ‘dead’ flic weeks- UK in Cannes week (when all major critics are otherwise sunning themselves in the dark of Cannes), US in the opening weeks of summer Hamptons despair? Happenstance: just curious?
The ‘plot’ is crucial to the understanding of Phoenix. So- read that elsewhere;) What is ‘scary’ is the rather jejeune reconstruction of truth on the part of its protagonist (heroine) Lene. She does remarkably succeed in allowing a truth still burn and rise from within her/the ashes (her Jewish friend suicides instead). When does masochism turn its Janus head and become sadism? There are undoubted echoes of The Night Porter. One is left cold by Phoenix . Cold and hungry. It is that unfathomable nature of human need that thrusts this film to its inevitable devastating humanity. Something Petzold has always been seeking.
