One of the things I love about this film is the production design and photography. I love how the first half, set in the US in 1957-60, is warm and bright and colourful. I love how the GDR scenes, in East Berlin in 1961, are bleak, drained of colour, cold. It amuses me that we see the Berlin Wall being built in some kind of sub-arctic winter hell, when it was actually built (virtually overnight) in August, at the height of summer.
Berlin during a heatwave.
I chortled at those scenes, and applaud the artistic decision to do it that way. Indeed I really love the depiction of a bombed-out nightmare GDR, where soldiers smash you in the face just because you accidentally inclined your head to the west, the Stasi arrest you and throw you in a cold and smelly prison cell just because your passport photo makes you look like a bit shifty, and the border troops gun you down without a second thought, even if you're only popping out to get some cat food. Historical accuracy is always subservient to storytelling, and we all know it wasn't really as cartoonishly bad as that in the GDR, but it wasn't far off. And it makes a brilliant backdrop for stories. Watching a craggy, snowed-on Tom Hanks down glasses of vodka as he plays cat and mouse with inscrutable agents for both Moscow and East Berlin is my kind of movie, frankly.
The only thing I miss is black and white photography and Richard Burton (I am obsessed with The Spy Who Came In from the Cold).
