Bridge of Spies

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Tom Hanks, Bridge of Spies

Tom Hanks in Bridge of Spies

Stephen Spielberg’s riveting new film (trailer) portrays the real-life events and personalities that led to a historic U.S.-Soviet-East German prisoner exchange in the frozen depths of the Cold War. In 1962, in a divided Berlin, an accused Soviet spy is to be traded for two Americans, if all goes well. An off-the-books U.S. negotiator has led the Soviets and the East Germans separately to the brink of agreeing the exchange, but hostilities are strong, motives are complex, and success is far from guaranteed.

Based on the 2010 Giles Whittell book of the same name, the story centers around the intertwined fates of William Fisher, born Rudolf Abel, a British-born KGB agent whom the FBI arrested in New York; Francis Gary Powers, U.S. pilot of a super-secret U-2 spy plane shot down while flying over Russia; and Frederic Pryor, an American graduate student who finds himself on the wrong side of the new Berlin Wall and in the hands of the Stasi, East Germany’s notorious secret police.

Spielberg tells these men’s stories, but centers on the role of U.S. insurance attorney James Donovan in the negotiations. Donovan’s role initially is to defend Abel in his trial on espionage charges. He takes on this thankless task, even though everyone in the country, including the judge in the case, believes Abel is guilty. However, American legal processes need to be followed, if only to show the world that every prisoner receives a fair trial (an ironic punctiliousness half a century later). Inevitably, Abel is convicted, but at least Donovan persuades the judge not to invoke the death penalty. It’s a controversial choice for Donovan to decide to appeal the verdict, and one that puts himself—and perhaps his family and career—in some danger.

When Powers’s plane is shot down, the possibility of a prisoner swap is immediately seized upon by the CIA. They want Powers back. He knows too much. Donovan is asked to negotiate an Abel-Powers trade, unofficially. What he encounters on all sides in wintry Berlin is stubborn resistance salted with suffocating paranoia. He also hears about the unlucky American student and insists he be part of the deal, which the CIA rejects. They’re not interested.

The acting is terrific, especially Tom Hanks as Donovan and Mark Rylance as Abel. In smaller roles, the CIA agents and Soviet and East German negotiators are suitably opaque and blustering. Amy Ryan, Donovan’s wife, is always excellent. They have the benefit of working from a strong script by Matt Charman, Ethan Coen, and Joel Coen. I particularly liked how, whenever Donovan asks Abel if he is worried about some particular outcome, Abel responds, “Would it help?”

The look of the film is exactly right—cold, forbidding—and the Glienicke Bridge, site of the hoped-for exchange is a desolate place. Spielberg’s handling of Donovan as “the standing man,” underscoring a metaphor introduced by Abel, works. If only he’d resisted a few message-heavy Hollywood touches (East Germans versus U.S. children scrambling over a wall, for example), it would have been perfect.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 92%; audiences 91%.

*****Clockers

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The Wire

Larry Gilliard, Jr., as D’Angelo Barksdale, second from right, on his perch, running his game in The Wire

By Richard Price – When I read Richard Price’s new crime novel The Whites earlier this year, I knew I needed to loop around and read his 1992 classic, widely considered his “best.” It really is knock-your-socks-off. In alternating chapters, it adopts the point of view of Strike, a young crack dealer in the housing projects of fictional Dempsey, New Jersey, across the river from Manhattan, and homicide detective Rocco Klein.

Strike is a lower-level dealer who wants to get out of it, but without even a high school education, he can’t see any other path forward. Rocco is a seen-it-all investigator working in the county prosecutor’s office. What brings these two together is the murder confession by Strike’s straight-arrow brother Victor. Strike was supposed to make the hit, and didn’t, but he doesn’t think Victor did it either, and he wants to save his brother whatever way he can. Rocco figures Strike for the shooter, but can’t get Victor to change his story.

It’s a story about poor people, mostly black, and lost fathers, in which a few heroic mothers struggle to maintain family order. Strike’s cocaine- and crack-fueled world (he himself never uses the product) is under constant yet ineffectual harassment by federal, state, and local police, housing police, and narcotics officers. The homicide detectives, who are a little higher on the law enforcement pecking order, are less frequent visitors to this milieu. They have their own agenda and sometimes cooperate with the other authorities, and sometimes not. Strike can never be sure where loyalties lie, even those of his own runners (the “clockers,” because the drug market operates 24/7), who may ally with rival drug lords at any time. He certainly can’t trust Rocco, who is always playing games of his own.

What makes the book so powerful are the deep portraits of the characters. Both the main players are both strong and weak, the reader likes and loathes them in almost equal measure. Supporting characters—Rocco’s partner Mazilli and Strike’s boss Rodney, especially—are fully drawn and absolutely believable. The writing, including the characters’ dialog, is pitch-perfect.

Price was one of the writers for the best-tv-ever series [!!], The Wire, and reading this book after seeing the show, I certainly saw echoes of some of its notable characters: D’Angelo sitting on his perch in the projects, managing a team of young runners; Omar, the invincible hit-man cut down by a child; Officer Thomas Hauc, the violent and racist enforcer. Spike Lee made it into a movie in 1995 starring Mekhi Phifer, Harvey Keitel, John Turturro, and Delroy Lindo.

Even though the narcotics picture has changed in the past 23 years, this remains a riveting book because of the strength of its story and the social dysfunctions it lays bare, which are still, by and large, unresolved.

More Philadelphia Outdoor Art Magic

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Isaiah Zagar, Philadelphia

(photo: Rob Wanenchak, creative commons license)

Although Philadelphia street-art may be most famous for its astonishing array of some 4000 public murals and several world-famous sculptures, the city is also home to a quirky collection of outdoor mosaic art by Isaiah Zagar. He has covered storefronts, purpose-built walls, doorways, and the fully mosaicked gallery spaces and labyrinth sculpture garden called “Magic Gardens” at 1020 South Street. Online resources include a map of the locations of Zagar’s mosaic installations in his Center City neighborhood.

Philadelphia-born Zagar assembles his elaborate designs from broken pottery, pieces of mirror, bottles, and even unexpected materials like bicycle wheels. They are a sprightly addition to the area’s staid colonial architecture, and on a sunny day wink at passersby with their color and shine. In order to make art more accessible to wider audiences and to engage more people in artistic creation, the Magic Gardens hold monthly Mosaic Mural Workshops and Family Jams.

Isaiah Zagar, Philadelphia

(photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

Zagar’s work is included in the permanent collections of a number of prominent museums, and he has received numerous awards. He says his work makes reference to other visionary artists from around the world who have created memorable public art environments, such as those here. (If Philadelphia isn’t near you, perhaps the work of one of these other eccentric creatives is!)

Zagar’s son Jeremiah made a well regarded “warts and all” film about the family and Isaiah’s artistic ambitions, In a Dream.

 

Enlarging Your Travel Circle:

  • Philadelphia is less than 50 miles away when you’re visiting Wilmington (33 miles)
  • About 100 miles away when you’re in New York (96) or Baltimore (101) and
  • Only 140 miles away when you’re in Washington, D.C.

Phoenix

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Phoenix, Nina HossWhat is identity? Is it who we are or who others think we are? A scenario capable of stripping people of their selfhood greater than the Holocaust is hard to imagine, and German filmmaker Christian Petzold puts his protagonist Nelly, played with great subtlety by Nina Hoss, in that predicament in Phoenix (trailer). A Jewish former cabaret singer, she’s somehow survived the concentration camp and is determined to return to Berlin to find her husband Johnny among the piled-up post-war debris and psychological ruin. Her stalwart friend Lene doesn’t trust Johnny, but Nelly won’t be deterred.

She was horribly disfigured by her concentration camp experience and, aided by Lene (Nina Kunzendorf), undergoes extensive reconstructive surgery, pleading for the Swiss doctor to return her face to exactly the way it looked before, though he warns her that may be impossible. In Berlin, still bearing the bruises of her extensive plastic surgery, she re-encounters Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld). His belief that Nelly is dead is so strong, he ignores signs that this woman, who calls herself “Esther” (“There aren’t too many Esthers left,” he says), and his wife are one and the same.

In her job, Lene finds people among the dislocated and helps them get them to Palestine. She plans for them both to go there, a future she believes in whole-heartedly, but which interests Nelly not at all. The endless poring over the lists of the murdered takes its toll, and Lene finally says she feels more kinship “with our dead than with the living.”

Johnny wants Nelly to masquerade as his wife to gain the fortune she’s inherited after the deaths of her entire family. This leaves her with the mind-bending quandary of pretending to be someone pretending to be who she really is. In truth, neither of them can “see” the other.

Based on a somewhat simplified version of the French novel Return from the Ashes, it’s a story about the crumbling of trust and how illusions—Nelly’s and Johnny’s equally—blind us to reality. A powerful film whose conclusion is a shattering confrontation with the truth. Excellent performances by Hoss, Zehrfeld, and Kunzendorf. Kurt Weill’s haunting “Speak Low” is heard throughout in different versions.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating an unequivocal 99%! Viewers 81%.

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****Midnight in Europe

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Guernica, tapestry, Picasso

(photo: copyright by Ceridwen, creative commons license)*

By Alan Furst – A new Alan Furst book in my to-read stack is a temptation hard to resist. His ability to evoke the thickening clouds of dread gathering over Europe in the 1930s is unsurpassed, while we, with the benefit of hindsight, would like to reach into the story and propel the characters into different directions and decisions.

This thriller concerns efforts to get weapons to the anti-Fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War, a conflict that gave the Nazis a chance to flex their military muscle on the side of Francisco Franco. The war served as a grim prelude to World War II. This is the Spain of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and the short stories of Julian Zabalbeascoa, the most recent, “Gernika,” published in the fall 2015 Glimmer Train.

In Furst’s novel, a Spanish lawyer working in Paris agrees to help in the arms-buy arrangements, which isn’t easy, as several countries have embargoed munitions shipments to Spain, and spies are everywhere. A little romance, too. I particularly like how Furst takes ordinary people—by that I mean people whom readers can identify with, who don’t know all the secrets of arcane martial arts or who in college did not letter in six grueling sports, including sharpshooting, of course, or who aren’t alumni of elite undercover military units—and puts them in situations that test their wits and their nerve.

I’ve read all of Furst’s books and know how he works. Yet putting myself in his hands remains an absorbing and tension-filled ride through an ominous and bitter historical time.

*This tapestry reproduction of Picasso’s famous anti-war painting “Guernica,” created in response to the Spanish Civil War is interesting in itself. It is on display here in The Whitechapel Gallery, the only British venue to exhibit the painting in 1939. According to the gallery, “The original work is now too fragile to leave Madrid; this tapestry was loaned to the gallery, for its re-opening, by its owner Margaretta Rockefeller. Normally it hangs in the United Nations in New York where in 2003 it was controversially veiled prior to a speech by Colin Powell on the eve of the Iraq war.”

Song for the Disappeared

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Song for the Disappeared

Vivia Font & Christina Nieves in “Song for the Disappeared”

This new 90-minute play promised to dramatize several of my painful reads of the past year regarding the vulnerability of people caught, often through no fault of their own, in the ultra-violent wars of the Mexican narco-cartels. These issues have been painfully explored in both fiction (The Cartel) and non-fiction (Down by the River) exposés reviewed here.

Song for the Disappeared, by Tanya Saracho, probes the problem of fractured loyalties and the inability of even the wealthy to distance themselves from the consequences of operating within a totally broken system. The family patriarch is an honorable man, apparently, but his uprightness provides him and his family no protection; his recently returned daughter has pursued her literary aims, but only her naiveté allowed her to believe her novel about a narcotraficante family would be regarded as fiction; her ex-fiancé, now the father’s only trusted aide, has turned to religion for protection; and the father’s young wife, viewed by the others as a complete airhead, has her own demons.

When the play begins, the family heir Javier has disappeared. The family reunites at its remote Texas ranch, where everyone’s vulnerabilities are exposed, and no one is sure how to proceed or what will come next. Their struggles are symbolized in the actions of the younger daughter, slightly deranged and struggling to save the smallest and most vulnerable creatures she finds. Meanwhile, the wild dogs circle every more closely.

The all-Latino cast in the Passage Theatre production does a fine job. Even in Passage’s tiny venue, it is an engaging theatrical event, directed by Alex Correia. On stage until October 25.

Mural Capital of the World!

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mural, philadelphia

“Building the City” by Michael Webb (photo: Erik Anestad, creative commons license)

Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program has become a world leader in public art and community involvement with the amazing 4,000 murals it has supported now gracing the exterior walls of all types of buildings. Many of them, like “Building the City” above, use trompe l’oeil techniques that make you look twice: where does the building end and the mural begin?!

The roots of the program are in an initiative city government began 30 years ago to combat graffiti. But it has gone far beyond that limited goal, to become a positive force in the community, with a rich array of activities and initiatives. A key success factor was the decision to create a nonprofit organization to run the program, which allows it to raise money and increase its annual budget manyfold. Now only $1 in $6 comes from City of Philadelphia coffers.

The murals are community projects in every sense, in that neighborhood people actively participate in decisions about what and whom each mural should depict, and they also may help actually create the mural. The technology for producing murals has advanced in ways that enable groups as diverse as schoolchildren and prison inmates to help. Inmates are taught program-related job skills that may help them find future employment. Graffiti is rarely a problem on walls with murals, and community murals can motivate local development and pride. As MAP director Jane Golden says, “Art ignites change.”

In the old days, scaffolding or cherry-pickers were used to lift painters to the top of their big outdoor “canvas.” Some murals are still produced that way, with paint applied directly to the carefully prepared wall. Today, however, many murals are painted in pieces—usually five feet by five feet—on parachute cloth, which is what allows them to be worked on off-site. The painted cloths pieces are then glued in place on the wall. Over the years, paints used in the murals have improved too.

Because of UV protection, they are less likely to fade, and are expected to last from 25 to 30 years. Eight to 10 are scheduled for refurbishment each year. Although most of the murals are painted, some are partially or wholly completed in ceramic tiles.

The Mural Arts Program offers many guided tours—by neighborhood, by theme, by artist—allowing visitors to explore this remarkable public resource. Some of the tours are by trolley, segway, or bicycle. People who want go their own way will find a guide online. Many murals have collateral information available by app or phone.

Enlarging Your Travel Circle:

  • Philadelphia is less than 50 miles away when you’re visiting Wilmington (33 miles)
  • About 100 miles away when you’re in New York (96) or Baltimore (101) and
  • Only 140 miles away when you’re in Washington, D.C.

***The Sudden Disappearance of the Worker Bees

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honeybee

(photo: James DeMers for Pixabay)

By Serge Quadruppani (A Commissario Simona Tavianello Mystery) – On vacation somewhere in the mountainous part of Italy, police Commissario Simona Tavianello and her husband Marco, himself a capo commissario (police chief) encounter the dead body of an engineer for a major—and highly secretive—agricultural research firm. Local activists suspect the victim’s company of contributing to the disappearance of the area’s honeybees, and he’s been shot on the premises of a deserted beekeeper’s shop. While this case ordinarily wouldn’t involve the vacationing couple, it soon emerges that the murder weapon was Simona’s own gun.

A smarmy television reporter . . . an eccentric local scientist . . . a shady government spy . . . a ruthless industrialist—the full deck of eccentric personalities is here, against the backdrop of a real-life crisis in agriculture and some interesting speculation on the promise (or is it the threat?) of nanotechnology.

Possibly it’s an artifact of the translation of this mystery, but a time or two I was unclear which of the book’s many characters was under discussion. More puzzling was the author’s habit of having characters openly blurt out a confession, subverting the mystery. Poor Simona (who ordinarily works for the anti-mafia squad) is involved in the case because of her gun, and she’s also in the way, as the local police try to sort things out.

Her husband is retired and she herself is described as white-haired and a little thick around the middle, yet she still has an eye for the handsome beekeeper that arouses her husband’s jealousy, mostly good-natured. They are old antagonists, locked in a lifelong battle that pleases them both. Their relationship is quite fun for the reader, too.

Quadruppani has a distinctive, somewhat breathless writing style, moving his characters rapidly from one scene to another, and a facility with description of the Italian countryside and lifestyle. Fans of previous books in this series may have developed a fondness for Simona and Marco. As a first-time reader, I found the pace a little frantic—too reminiscent of a bee flitting from flower to flower, gaining information pollen grain by grain, but still needing some serious processing to produce honey.

****The Romanov Sisters

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Tsar, Russia, Romanov

Standing: Maria, Tsaritsa Alexandra; seated, Olga, Tsar Nicholas II, Anastasia, Alexey, Tatiana

By Helen Rappaport – Prepare to have your heart broken. Like everyone, I knew that the Russian Revolution of 1917 brought a violent end to the rule of the Romanov family and the tsars. I also knew the gruesome trivia that Tsaritsa Alexandra had family jewelry taken apart and the gems sewn into her daughters’ clothing. In July 1918, when the family was led to the tiny half-cellar room where they were shot, at first many of the bullets struck the gems and bounced away, giving the fleeting impression the girls were impervious to them.

Rappaport wrote about that last horrific scene in a previous book, Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs, and she may have wanted to spare us—and herself—from reliving it. In this book, she follows the family right up to its final hours, and I found myself reading more and more slowly, trying to delay the inevitable.

Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia were 22, 21, 19, and 17 at the time of their deaths. The book follows the courtship and marriage of their parents, the births and childhoods, and their maturing to young women through remaining letters diaries, and reminiscences of friends and relatives at the time. The reader comes to know these intelligent, warm-hearted, and lively young women well, and their unnecessary death is devastating.

It’s perhaps inevitable to speculate about a happier outcome. What if Nicholas hadn’t unexpectedly become Tsar at the age of 26? What if he’d been a stronger, more experienced military and political leader, a more flexible one, receptive to the idea of constitutional monarchy? What if their mother had been less withdrawn, chronically ill, and mentally fragile and had fostered—rather than assumed—the love of the Russian people? What if heir Alexey hadn’t inherited the hemophilia gene? Would she not have fallen under the sway of the much-reviled Grigory Rasputin?

Even without any of these circumstances, what if Nicholas and Alexandra had taken one of their many opportunities to leave Russia or at least send their daughters abroad? Eventually, even England’s King George V—determined to keep Soviet Russia as an ally in the war against Germany—withdrew his offer to provide his cousins safe haven.

They girls lives were closely sheltered, and they saw little of life as it existed outside their palaces or aboard the imperial yacht used for summer vacations. Alexandra often dressed them all in long white dresses, and that’s the picture most people had of them: remote, inviolate.

Russia, Romanov

Olga & Tatiana with a wounded soldier

An exception arose during the War, when Alexandra, Olga, and Tatiana trained to be nurses. Alexandra couldn’t reliably fulfill these duties because of her health, but the older two—especially Tatiana—were tireless. They wrapped bandages, dressed wounds, assisted in surgery, cleaned instruments, and did everything they could to aid the wounded soldiers in their care, including raising funds for their hospitals. The two younger girls read to the wounded and wrote letters for them.

These soldiers, like everyone else who met them, repeatedly remarked how natural and unaffected the girls were, how curious they were about the lives of other people. They were not at all like what they expected Grand Duchesses to be or what their popular image was. Rappaport has written a well researched, engaging biography of these brief lives and a century-old crime.

 

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****On the Road with Del and Louise

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Route 66, highway, Arizona

(photo: wikimedia.org)

By Art Taylor– Is it OK to say a book by a male author is “charming”? Regardless of possible gender-bias, this book is. Del and Louise are a couple brought together by crime. They met when Del was robbing the 7-11 in Eagle Nest, New Mexico, where Louise worked. They stay together during a succession of American-style self-reinventions aimed at getting a “fresh start,” reinventions that invariably wind up in one shady enterprise or another, and they ultimately . . . well, read the book and find out.

Taylor is an award-winning short story writer, and the individual chapters of this picaresque could stand alone. In fact, the first two chapters have done so, in past issues of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, where I first read and admired his work. His stories have won numerous Derringer, Agatha, and Macavity awards and are frequently anthologized.

What’s especially fun about On the Road is how well Taylor develops the two principal characters. Del wants to do right, to get straight, but it just isn’t happening, and Louise isn’t above a little larceny herself, if it promotes the couple’s welfare. Del’s intelligence is complemented by Louise’s cleverness in a pinch, and Del’s planning skills by Louise’s gut instincts. Together, they are a “doing the best they can” pair and their story is filled with humor and insight into human failings. The people they meet along the way have plenty of those, as they do themselves.

Their adventures are recounted by Louise in a straightforward and wry narrative voice that includes plenty of insight into her own shortcomings. Although the text is relatively unembellished, Taylor allows himself some spot-on literary flourishes (for instance, when he describes an early morning near Taos as “the sun creeping up, the boil not yet on the day”) and comic bits: “If that first winery we went to was upper crust, the bar in Napa was sure the bottom of the pie.”

Their travels take them from New Mexico to Victorville and Napa Valley, California, then to a comically disastrous scene in a Las Vegas wedding chapel (do I even need to say “cheesy”?). A stint in the North Dakota oil fields proves financially rewarding and emotionally bankrupting. There, Louise learns anew that “The reasons you do things don’t always make up for the doing of them.” Finally they reach North Carolina, Louise’s home state, and her acerbic mother Cora. Her relentless belittling and undermining of Del are priceless, as if all the wicked thrusts and jabs of a lifetime must be desperately delivered in one short visit.

Taylor has created an enjoyable tale and some nerve-wracking adventures without the need for a gruesome body count or far-fetched end-of-the-word-as-we-know-it scenarios. Because the story is so grounded in imperfect humanity and told so convincingly, we share Del and Louise’s bumpy ride, rooting for them every mile of the way. While their lives will never be trouble-free, the reader senses they will always be good.

A longer version of this review appeared on the Crime Fiction Lover website.