Summary
Sparrows are red.
The training is blue.
This film’s about spy craft.
Plus disempowerment too.
In an ideal world, the Cold War would have never ended. In fact, some would argue that it never really did. That’s where the best spy fiction came from after all. In director Francis Lawrence’s adaptation of RED SPARROW, loosely inspired by the 2013 Jason Matthews novel, there’s a timeless quality to the intercontinental posturing. It’s just a shame that some gender attitudes haven’t shifted much since the 1960s.
After a crushing injury during a performance, ballet dancer Dominika Egorova (Jennifer Lawrence) is recruited into the Russian spy service by her uncle (Matthias Schoenaerts). She is taught to be a ‘Sparrow,’ a training program in which the graduates are adept at seducing their targets. The State focuses her on Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton), a CIA operative who is the handler for a double agent known only as MARBLE. In order to protect her mother, Dominika finds herself willing to go down paths she didn’t previously consider palatable.
There’s initially an austere charm to RED SPARROW that partially speaks to Francis Lawrence’s maturity as a filmmaker. Evolving through three Hunger Games films, here we see a restrained aesthetic that emphasises the practicalities of ‘wet work.’ The streamlined version of Matthews’ narrative, which removes the book’s motif of giving Dominika synesthesia, isn’t as interested in the sexy times as it is the global chess game being played out. Sure, there’s the highly publicised nudity of the lead, but often it feels like a soft-core flick that really wanted to skip to the people standing around in offices talking.
There’s an ugly side to this approach as well. RED SPARROW‘s difficult relationship with sexuality wants us to believe that it’s about positive empowerment, a revenge fantasy in which the heroine is given agency through her emerging self-awareness. From the moment Dominika is raped while witnessing a political assassination, she is repeatedly subjected to brutal torture and manipulation.
The film tries to soften this somewhat by giving us Charlotte Rampling as Dominika’s stern trainer, and later another female agent acts as her torturer. Nevertheless, it is still Francis Lawrence and writer Justin Haythe standing behind the camera making it all happen. Peripheral female characters are perfunctorily brutalised to death, albeit mercifully off camera. Another is humiliated for refusing to perform oral sex on a fellow trainee.
This inherent misogyny, in combination with the low-key approach to thrills, has the net effect of sapping one’s engagement levels. There are some beautifully executed scenes, of course, including a few classic sequences that are throwbacks to old-school spy films. It’s just that they are presented as a series of fragments with no connective tissue, as double agents are revealed without a sense of their meaning to the larger world. Speaking of failing to connect, there’s zero chemistry between would-be lovers Edgerton and Lawrence, despite repeated attempts to convince us the former is “handsome.”
In the final moments of the film, Haythe’s script takes a sharp turn away from the source material, giving Dominika something akin to a payoff for the degradation she’s endured. Yet the journey getting us there commits the ultimate crime of being nothing more than mediocre, and dull at its worst. This is no mean feat when you have Jeremy Irons, Ciaran Hinds, and a drunken Mary-Louise Parker in your supporting cast. It’s one of the few time when you hope the Cold War would heat up again, if for no other reason than for the spy thrillers to be about something more than savage beatings and exchanging outdated floppy disks.
