Browse all reviews by letter     A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z 0 - 9

United Kingdom 2018
Directed by
Trevor Nunn
101 minutes
Rated M

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
2.5 stars

Red Joan

As a host of films testify, the English do the 1930s and ‘40s, the emblematic character-building years of their crumbling empire particularly well and with detailed production design, impressive art direction, wardrobe, hair and make-up and so on Red Joan is a solid film. Unfortunately that is also its handicap with director Trevor Nunn (Twelfth Night,1996, Lady Jane, 1985) evidently unable to lift the material dramatically beyond its thorough-going production values and familiar narrative tropes. Much of the problem, one suspects, lies with the film’s time-flipping structure that keeps us at arms’ length.   

The film opens in 2000 with octogenarian Joan Stanley (Judi Dench) being arrested in her front garden for violating the Official Secrets Act when she was a graduate student at Cambridge in the 1940s.  As you expect the film then flips back and forth between the two time periods to explain her story.

This is where things go wrong. Dench, needless to say, is superb and if it had been she who told her story the film might have been something to watch. Instead we get a handsome recreation of events, with twenty-something Joan played by Sophie Cookson in what is the larger portion of the film, intermittently broken into by unmotivated returns to the story's present. As Dench does little but look terribly worn in these scenes and Nunn favours lot of close up of Joan's haggard face this, whilst adding nothing dramatically to the film, rather distractingly serves to draw our attention, in what is a kind of unintended meta-moral, to the awful realities of time.

The photogenic Cookson is quite effective as the young Joan as she gets swept up in the tide of history via an affair with a young Communist apologist (Tom Hughes) albeit that the story of how she came to betray her country (there is a none-too-persuasive counter argument presented by Joan that she did not) unfolds in very familiar ways. The only new element is a sub-plot involving Joan’s outraged son, Nick (Ben Miles), a straight-laced barrister who struggles to reconcile himself to his mother’s shady past. This, aspect however is somewhat over-stated (and none-too-convincingly realised) and is bent to a rather contrived resolution.

Red Joan would probably have been better as a straight-forward period film and the attempt to build the story around the drawing power of Dame Judi Dench, a mis-calculation.

 

 

back

Want something different?

random vintage best worst