Red Joan, review: Judi Dench is wasted in this absurd portrayal of the Bolshevik of Bexleyheath
Dir: Trevor Nunn; Starring: Judi Dench, Sophie Cookson, Stephen Campbell Moore, Tom Hughes, Ben Miles, Nina Sosanya, Tereza Srbova. 12A cert, 101 mins.
Judi Dench is a significant asset in the veteran stage director Trevor Nunn’s new film, and in more than just the usual sense. She plays a long-retired civil servant who is arrested one morning on a charge of passing nuclear secrets to the Russians: a head-spinning claim that is soon established to be entirely accurate.
Dench’s character is called Joan Stanley, though is inspired by the late Melita Norwood, a harmless-seeming great-grandmother who was unmasked as a KGB agent in 1999, and was henceforth known variously as the Bolshevik of Bexleyheath and the Spy Who Came in from the Co-op.
Lindsay Shapero’s script, adapted from the 2014 novel by Jennie Rooney, doesn’t have as much fun with this as you might hope: in fact, it doesn’t have much fun full stop, and is quick to bundle Joan into an interview room where she’s grilled by Nina Sosanya’s investigating officer, and defended by her growingly incredulous lawyer son (Ben Miles). Her faltering confession serves as a frustratingly thin dramatic frame for various drab, vaguely musty-smelling flashbacks to the 1930s and Forties, in which the young Joan (Sophie Cookson) burrows ever deeper into both the Soviet cause and the British atomic weapons project, while wrestling with her conscience to leak or not to leak.
In real life, Norwood was an unrepentant supporter of the Soviet project to the end: even after being outed, she described the regime as a good idea “on the whole”. And what a treat it might have been to watch Dench feel her way dramatically around that mindset in a full-blooded anti-heroine character study – particularly with an old theatreland crony like Nunn behind the camera, and the spectre (pun intended) of Dench’s immortal eight-film stint as James Bond’s commanding officer M hanging over the whole enterprise.
But instead, and not a little absurdly, Red Joan seems more interested in its subject as a pioneering woman in the workplace – a kind of Tovarich Brockovich – whose sex keeps her under the radar while (theoretically) adding an erotic zing to her dealings with close male colleagues and contacts. Stephen Campbell Moore plays a left-leaning British researcher on the project who starts as Joan’s boss and becomes a lover; Tom Hughes is the Byronic Russian radical called Leo who beguiles her into the cause with a hot date at a socialist cinema club, where they sing The Red Flag then watch Battleship Potemkin. These two are introduced by Leo’s cartoonishly vivacious cousin Sonya (Tereza Srbova), a contemporary of Joan’s at Cambridge who bears a more than passing resemblance to the glamorous former Russian spy Anna Chapman.
Cookson plays the still-waters-run-deep stuff persuasively, and as such makes a highly convincing younger Dench. But the plot’s tendency to chivvy Joan along with romances chips away at its already spurious girl-power credentials. Painfully aware that having a traitor for a heroine is dicey territory, the screenplay also cops out spectacularly on the matter of Joan’s politics, suggesting her primary aim all along was to hasten on a global nuclear stalemate, thereby ruling out any future Hiroshimas or Nagasakis.
This might be logical enough on paper – and in fact, late on, the elderly Joan does point out with a quiver of defiance that history has proven her right. But as a dramatic motor it comes across as heinously priggish, and denies Dench the opportunity to dig into anything juicier in her limited screen time. As might be expected, her performance is alive with psychological detail, but the role offers no scope for the kind of deft, surprising, in-the-moment choices that are a hallmark of her work. It’s a simplistic take on a potentially fascinating subject: right cast, wrong film.
