We watched two Academy Award-nominated movies this weekend. On Friday, we saw Bridge of Spies, starring Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance, the latter the winner of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. I loved Rylance’s character’s response (perhaps a tad overused) whenever anyone asked him if he was worried. “Would it do any good?” I have an affinity for Berlin Wall stories: that was the setting for my Ice Cold story “The Honey Trap,” which was nominated for an ITW Thriller Award last year. I researched Berlin in the early 1960s extensively for that story and watched a movie filmed and set in the era as well (Michael Caine’s Funeral in Berlin). I was in Berlin in 1986 and crossed through Check Point Charlie into East Berlin, where I stayed for nearly two weeks. I’d love to go back to Berlin some day to see how different it is now.
Bridge of Spies was pretty good. Low-level people working behind the scenes to do things that authorized people at higher, more official levels of government couldn’t. Also interesting to see the tension between the Soviets and the East Germans during that turbulent period.
On Saturday we saw Room, the story of a woman who had been kidnapped at seventeen and spent seven years in captivity, living in a shed in her captor’s back yard, most of it with her son Jack. The first half of the movie shows their daily routine while in captivity and the second half shows what their lives are like after they are free. Obviously inspired by real events, but it’s a brave story all the same because taking on the scope of the emotional impact of this kind of experience is pretty daunting. Brie Larson won the Oscar for Best Actress, but the Canadian kid who plays Jack could have taken home a trophy, too. He was probably only eight when he made the movie, and he’s in it a lot. Impressive.
We were amused to see a preview for a new TV series called The Family starring Joan Allen as the mother of a son who was kidnapped and returns at some point years later. Same as her character in Room. It’s an unusual niche category.
