Jan Donovan Amorosi had just seen Steven Spielberg's Bridge of Spies at a special screening the night before its New York Film Festival premiere at Alice Tully Hall on Sunday night. "We had no idea what our father had gone through when we were growing up in Brooklyn," she said, now preparing for a second viewing. "We wondered why no one did anything with his unusual story for 40 years after he died. We now know what he went through, that he was a hero." Her father, Jim Donovan, an insurance attorney, comes to save two Americans -- U-2 pilot Gary Powers and graduate student Frederic Powers -- held in East Berlin in 1962, by ingeniously engineering a trade for a Soviet spy, Rudolf Abel. Donovan is played by the immensely appealing Tom Hanks in one of his best performances, and Abel is played by one of the most brilliant theater actors, Mark Rylance.
Introducing the film, Spielberg noted the film's two halves, the first set in New York, the second in Berlin, so it was appropriate for the film to premiere here, although he will say the same premiering it in Germany. He then introduced his cast, a melding of Americans including Amy Ryan, who nails that old school '60s housewife demeanor, and Germans, including Sebastian Koch, star of the 2006 Foreign Language Oscar winner, The Lives of Others, and now featured in this season's Homeland on Showtime. Alan Alda, Billy Magnussen, Will Rogers, and newcomer Nadja Bobyleva, a Russian transplant to Berlin, work well to bring this spy thriller, with a script honed to perfection by Ethan and Joel Coen, to life.
At the Museum of Natural History the Donovan family mingled with Sting and Trudie Styler, Blythe Danner, Meg Ryan, Chris Botti, Wes Anderson, Brian D'arcy James, and many others, but the biggest surprise was a man in uniform, Spencer Stone, a hero of our time, who, with two friends, took down a terrorist on a French train.
The film will also be screened at the coming Hamptons International Film Festival. Bridge of Spies' casting director Ellen Lewis will talk on the panel, The Art of Casting.
A version of this post also appears on Gossip Central.