Four stars. Rated R, for strong violence, torture, graphic nudity, profanity and sexual content
By Derrick Bang
Red Sparrow has the crisp, nefarious and
extremely nasty verisimilitude of actual spycraft, and with good reason; it’s
based on a 2013 novel by Jason Matthews, who spent 33 years with the CIA’s
Directorate of Operations, where — as acknowledged in a 2015 New York Times interview — he recruited
and managed foreign agents, “often in places where such activity was
forbidden.”
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| Having endured a regimen of vile and debasing treatment while at a specialized spycraft school, Dominika (Jennifer Lawrence) now feels nothing but contempt for her Uncle Vanya (Matthias Schoenaerts), who she once naïvely assumed wanted only the best for her. |
Justin Haythe’s screenplay
adaptation has the slow burn of a complex John Le Carré espionage thriller,
which must please Matthews, a fan of both that author and Ian Fleming. Frankly,
I’m astonished; Haythe has no obvious experience with spy thrillers, and is
most recently known for junk such as The
Lone Ranger and the execrable A Cure
for Wellness. It’s nice to see this significantly more polished side.
Austrian director Francis
Lawrence obviously has developed a rapport with star Jennifer Lawrence, having
helmed her final three Hunger Games
outings. Red Sparrow is far more
serious stuff: a thoroughly absorbing saga of regret, duplicity and
reprehensible manipulation, set in a clandestine zone of prickly, real-world
geopolitics.
Matthews must be congratulating
himself for prescience: Such scheming cloak-and-dagger stuff seems even more
credible now, at a time when Russia’s destabilizing activities have become
daily front-page news.
Lawrence stars as Dominika
Egorova, a talented member of the Bolshoi Ballet, introduced as she takes the
stage for a standard performance (if anything done by Bolshoi dancers can be
considered “standard”). Francis Lawrence cross-cuts from these scenes to others
involving the late-night exchange of information between deep-cover CIA
operative Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton) and a mole buried deep within upper-level
Russian security operations.
Both sequences go awry. Dominika
suffers an on-stage accident that destroys her career — an early, horrifying
example of this film’s willingness to shock — while Nate’s meeting is exposed
by the chance arrival of Russian police officers.
For Dominika, it’s a shattering,
end-of-the-world catastrophe, and not merely because she spent her entire
childhood training to be a dancer. She’s the only child of an invalided single
mother (Joely Richardson) to whom she is devoted, and whose care — and the
reasonably nice apartment in which they live — have been funded by her Bolshoi
career.
Salvation — if it can be termed
thus — comes from Dominika’s Uncle Vanya (Matthias Schoenaerts), who has kept a
protective gaze on his deceased brother’s family. But Vanya’s interest is far
from benign; his “solution” to Dominika’s plight involves drawing her into his
realm of spycraft, with the specific goal of molding his niece into a
seductress able to corrupt Westerners into betraying their country.
Hardly a healthy attitude for an
uncle to have about his only niece.
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