Red Joan

Lionsgate | Release Date: April 19, 2019

5.0	USER SCORE Mixed or average reviews based on 25 Ratings

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hnestlyontheslyOct 7, 2019

This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. Red Joan is the film we chose instead of Little based on its critical score (as of this writing, a 30% on Tomatometer, which I think gives you a little bit of an idea of the general landscape of our film fare this weekend. Before we left, we read some reviews that included such gems as the film is “a good old-fashioned British spy thriller” (which seemed promising), and “By the time the film was finished, I felt ready to move on from these characters” (which was less so). One commenter describes the film as “a cookie cutter British spy story,” and yet another wrote, “For such an interesting story this was tragically dull. And, jesus what a way to waste Judi Dench’s talent,” which spelled for us a slightly better than mediocre time, I think.

The film itself follows the story of The Cambridge Five, a group of British intellectuals who conspired to pass on plans for the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union during the Cold War through the eyes of shockingly hip choice of Sophie Cookson from the Kingsman and Huntsman franchises. It’s a mashup of college romance and a spy thriller kept on a very, very low boil, but her choices are pretty stale: either the mopey, emotionally manipulative Tom Hughes or the impossibly old husband of Claire Foy, Stephen Campbell Moore. The way that the story keeps hidden the parentage of Joan’s son, Nick, is pretty clever, makes for a lot of will-they, won’t-they tension, but ultimately it just feels like such a slog of a film and a political puzzler that finds equivalents between the two sides of the Cold War. Judi Dench sounds so defiant and resolved in her understanding of the impact she made on world history, but there’s so little introspection about why she does what she does.

Wife felt really differently about this film, but I think for all the wrong reasons. She says, “Every hat Young Joan wore in that movie was AMAZING,” and I think she has a lot to say about the complexity and fullness of the relationship between Joan and her frenemy Sonya Galich. Development of characters . She likes how the film teased out whether or not Joan is actually going to participate in espionage, because she so often in the film refuses to yield to Leo, to the point that you question if she actually is guilty of the crimes accused. And then once we actually get the moment of clarity, the reason is clear and her motives were clear. The son was a good audience surrogate who goes from sympathy to horror. Judi Dench could have been better utilized, she says, but it might have taken away from the drama of the story being told in her youth. There are certainly some logistical difficulties with what we’re told about the way that the identity of the husband and father of Joan’s children, but it also added an element of drama to the storytelling. There are certain moments when the difficulties of being a woman in a man’s world are emphasized very artfully (even though, I noted, I think that women who were science students in the 40s at Cambridge were prohibited from working alongside men, to the point that they worked in segregated labs, which you can still visit if you go to the History and Philosophy of Science building–so the images of her working with test tubes and Bunsen burners with her male counterparts are, in my mind, purely fictional. This info, I think, is from Nicholas Chrimes’s excellent book, Cambridge, A Treasure Island in the Fens).… Expand

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