The world is not just made up of light and dark, good and evil, friend and enemy. The world is more complex than such simple distinctions.
This moral dilemma is exactly what “Bridge of Spies – The Negotiator”, the latest film by director Steven Spielberg, which is based on true events, is about. At first, New York lawyer James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks) is anything but enthusiastic when he is assigned to Soviet agent Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) as a public defender in the middle of the Cold War. However, Donovan quickly learns to respect his client and his loyalty to the USSR. Because even if Abel is an enemy of the state for the USA, he still deserves a fair trial.
Donovan is convinced that the principles of the democratic constitutional state apply to all people, whether good or evil, friend or enemy. For him, the moral value of a society can also be seen in how it deals with its enemies.
For Donovan, the fate of the individual is also important in the face of international conflicts. And so, shortly after Abel's trial, he became the CIA's negotiator in the first exchange of agents between the USA and the USSR. Abel is to be exchanged for the American spy pilot Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell). In East Berlin, Donovan leads the historical negotiations in which the boundaries between good and evil, friend and enemy are repeatedly blurred. He doesn't give up until Abel and Powers face each other on the Glienicke Bridge near Berlin in the early hours of February 10, 1962.
