20th Century Fox: Thriller. 139 minutes
So many people get tortured and killed in spy movies, it’s amazing that even a fictional character would want the job. Sure, James Bond drives fast cars, travels to exotic locales and has on-demand sex, but the other 10% of the gig seems like a real pain in the ass. All that fighting and slinking about and those tense conversations with exasperated superiors. Then there’s Dominika Egorova (Jennifer Lawrence), the Russian ballerina turned spy in Red Sparrow, a dense and silky Cold War thriller from director Francis Lawrence. Dominika, you see, has no choice.
She’s a ballerina from, if cinema is our guide, the only ballet company in the entirety of Russia, the Bolshoi. During a performance, she suffers a gruesome, career-ending injury, which means the Russian government will take away her state-provided apartment and the in-home care for her ailing mother (Joely Richardson). Enter Dominika’s Uncle Vanya (not the Chekhov one), played to slippery perfection by Matthias Schoenaerts. A high-ranking muckety-muck at SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, he offers to keep her and her mother’s modest lifestyle going if she agrees to a dangerous one-off assignment. When the job goes south, Dominika is given two choices: a bullet in the head or join the government’s ominous-sounding State School 4, “ominous” being the nicest thing one can say about it.
Red Sparrow is adapted from the novel of the same name by former CIA officer Jason Matthews. And while book and movie are based on his 33 years as a CIA agent, they might also have been based on his repeated viewings of Red Shoe Diaries. This is, at times, a frank and brutal perfume commercial of a movie. It also manages to be relevant and irrelevant at the same time. On the plus side, at least as far as Red Sparrow is concerned, the Russians are our enemy again (although you can put down your Red Dawn VHS. They like to operate in cyberspace now). So Jeremy Irons’ steely Russian general and the Drago-like hulk who gets off on torturing foreign agents feels less dated then it would in the years immediately following the World Trade Center attack. But Red Sparrow is, ultimately, not about politics, unless you put the word “sexual” in front of it. It’s where the movie, through no fault of its own, feels like a dressed-up guest bursting through the door of a party that’s already over.
State School 4 trains men and women to use their sexuality to extract information from the enemy. To achieve this end, the school’s Headmaster (an appropriately stern Charlotte Rampling) desexualizes their bodies, removing vanity, shame, sentimentality, joy and ego from the act of throwing off your clothes and screwing whomever, as long as it helps Mother Russia. “Every human being is a puzzle of need”, says the Headmaster, which is just a fancy way of saying, “if you screw them, they will talk.”
The lengthy sequence at the school is disturbing and nudity-filled which gives you a sense of how much Ms. Lawrence trusts Francis Lawrence, who directed her in, I believe, the last 12 Hunger Games movies. We’re supposed to desexualize their bodies as much as the characters do and, by the end, mission accomplished: the sex here is neither prurient nor titillating. It’s just another day at the office. And yet, let’s face it, there’s a reason Red Sparrow stars Jennifer Lawrence and not a similarly lusted-after man and it’s not just her box office clout and gifts as an actress. Thoughts of the #MeToo movement danced in my head as I watched a spy thriller about sleazy men ogling a woman who is forced by her bosses to get naked to complete her mission and stay employed (which, in this context, means stay alive). One can argue that Dominika is a strong and strong-willed mistress of her own destiny with plans for those who put her through “whore school.” All that is true. But, ultimately, it’s still a mostly naked Jennifer Lawrence, awaiting the male gaze, from both on-screen and off. Given current events, I found myself longing for a movie where Lawrence is in charge of a government agency, not its expendable, bottle-blonde asset trained in the art of seduction.
Until that day (she’s still only 27 years old), we can only admit that she’s fairly marvelous in the part, giving us more with facial expressions than most performers could with their entire body. This is an aloof and opaque movie where saying too much can get you killed and it’s impressive that Lawrence, by virtue of talent and sheer star wattage, gets us to care even a lick about a character who must hide more than she reveals. If only we cared as much about her mission and her handsome American target. He is the oddly named Nate Nash (a possible relative of John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt), a CIA agent with a mole in the Russian government. Dominika’s assignment is to befriend (and you know what that means) Nate and uncover the identity of his mole. Nate is played by Joel Edgerton, who always looks like he’s about 10 seconds away from bursting into tears. His soft facial features are mixed with a palooka mouth that makes him even more sympathetic. Nate has his own plans for Dominika and this is where Red Sparrow, a film that ultimately never achieves complete lift-off, really excels. Most games of chess are boring to watch and there are moments when this game of chess is, too. But the tangle of motivations between Dominika, Nate and Vanya, both overt and covert, keeps you wondering. And screenwriter Justin Haythe embraces the complications and asks the audience to keep up. Avoiding spoilers here, when Dominika tells the truth to Nate, you wonder: are her feelings for him causing her to slip? Is she playing another angle? Or is she reconsidering her allegiances? It may not be Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy but when it works, it satisfies in a way that most films at this budget level are too scared to even attempt.
With each new film, Francis Lawrence becomes one of the more interesting big-money directors. Mirroring the methodical and wary nature of his characters, he and DP Jo Willems, shooting primarily in gloomy Budapest, invest mostly in lockdowns and slow, stately camera moves. James Newton Howard’s moody score avoids spy movie clichés. Supporting performances are all expert and Mary-Louise Parker gives this slow-burn thriller a kick in the ass with her brief turn as a corrupt congressional assistant whose state secrets are improbably contained on that exciting, new, bleeding edge technological marvel: 3.5-inch floppy disks.
Because there are so few studio-backed adult thrillers nowadays, it’s tempting to grade on a curve and wholeheartedly support the “almost but not quite” Red Sparrow. Or, at least, it’s tempting to shame audiences into seeing the film to disprove the Headmaster’s theory that Americans are “drunk on shopping and social media.” But there’s no denying that Lawrence and Edgerton don’t generate much heat (and given their characters’ circumstances, they really can’t) and Dominika is too steely for our complete emotional investment in a film that strafes “a twist too far” territory. There’s also the sour aftertaste of how its sexual content risks being received at this cultural moment, which might make Red Sparrow a more satisfying experience after the current industry tumult dies down and Hollywood’s biggest jerks have been revealed, shamed and shot into space. Maybe Red Sparrow’s biggest accomplishment will be to someday render Dominika’s line, “we’ll always be their whores” laughably obsolete.