Breda O'Brien“Being honourable, and living up to high ideals, is most of service to people when they least want it”, writes Breda O’Brien
Sometimes you go to the movies just to get away from it all. Sometimes you get lucky, and experience not just a break in routine, but what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls ‘elevation’.
He defines elevation as the kind of positive response human beings feel in the presence of moral excellence, a feeling of being uplifted.
I had that sense of elevation after going to see Steven Spielberg’s latest movie, Bridge of Spies, which stars Tom Hanks. It is based on real characters and events during the Cold War, a time of unbelievable tension, when school children were being offered pathetically inadequate advice such as to ‘duck and cover’, if there were a nuclear attack.
James Donovan, the character played by Hanks, is a successful insurance lawyer, who is asked to defend a man accused of being a Russian spy, Rudolf Abel (who is played with nuance and understatement by another talented actor, Mark Rylance).
At the time, all the impotent fear that people felt in the face of the Soviet threat became focused on Abel – he was one of the most hated men in America, and most people wanted to see him get the death penalty.
Amerian values
Donovan takes on his case, because he believes that giving him a fair trial represents the best of American values. He wants to be better than the Soviets, to show that everyone is entitled to be treated with respect and dignity.
I want to avoid spoilers but it is scarcely surprising that there is a major human cost to his decision. His wife and children become targets, and there is a scene shot on public transport where all the eyes on the carriage begin to focus on him, with contempt being the predominant emotion.
He is not deterred. Later, he becomes a negotiator in a delicate case where it is proposed to exchange a convicted Soviet spy for a captured American pilot.
The word honourable recurs in the film. Donovan is an honourable man, although no saint. The very first time we meet him, he is engaged in negotiations on behalf of his insurance company client, which if he is successful, will result in only one payment instead of five, being paid to the victims of a car accident.
He is also brave, and audacious, and old boots would be soft in comparison to him when he is negotiating.
In many ways, it is a simple movie with a simple message.
Being honourable, and living up to high ideals, is most of service to people when they least want it. Despite the cost, it is worth persevering.
I must admit that when I left the cinema, I was afraid that a quick Google search would show up some horrible character flaw in the real Donovan, that would be more likely to elicit moral disgust than elevation.
It was wonderful to discover that Donovan was an even better man than the movie portrays. He was an Irish American, and a devout Catholic who prayed the St Francis prayer for peace daily.
In fact, he was later involved in another complex series of negotiations, this time in Cuba. He quoted the prayer attributed to St Francis to Fidel Castro.
“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy.”
The first lines also appear on his tombstone. He was successful in Cuba, negotiating the release of not only American prisoners, but of their families, by enlisting the help of pharmaceutical companies who agreed to donate millions in medical supplies to Cuba.
Thousands of people were freed and allowed to return to America.
His daughter, Mary Ellen Donovan Fuller, has written movingly of her father, saying that the “honour of doing good was almost a religious cause for him”.
Unsurprisingly, none of Donovan’s religious faith surfaces in the movie, but it doesn’t really matter. He is operating against a transcendent backdrop, where you do the right thing simply because it is the right thing.
It was not without cost. Donovan died very young, at the age 54, but by the time he did so, his country had begun to show him respect, despite initially branding him a ‘commie lover’ and a traitor to his country, simply for acting honourably.
Donovan worked at the time of the Cold War, but so much of what he says is relevant to today, including to the current struggle against apocalyptic Islamic fundamentalists.
Donovan’s own words are particularly relevant: “if the free world is not faithful to its own moral code, there remains no society for which others may hunger.”
As Britain bombs Syria, including civilians, they might ponder those words.