Film Review for you: Red Sparrow

Today I went to a matinee with my parents. We saw "Red Sparrow", and while I highly recommend it, I don’t recommend seeing it with your parents. This film dripped sex, violence, and Bulova handbags. Jennifer Lawrence plays the female lead, Dominika Egorova, holding a very complicated plot together through sheer force of will. That and skillful means—she’s a badass here, way beyond "The Hunger Games".

The movie was adapted from a spy novel of the same name, and, while fear of Mother Russia is a main theme, it’s more nuanced than a straight propaganda flick, though it does play up Western assumptions about dreary, hopeless, post-Cold War Russia. There are double, triple, and quadruple crosses in the plot, which I’ll try to summarize without giving anything away. This may strain my abilities as a reviewer—if you missed five minutes of this movie, you’d be lost.

Dominika is a prima ballerina with the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, until her dance partner lands on her leg and breaks it, ending her career (more to that story but I won’t give it away). Her mother is in poor health and they will soon run out of money, her father is dead. Dominika’s Uncle Vanya is high up in the SRV (what this movie calls the KGB) and offers her a sketchy job. She has to seduce a businessman and swap his phone for a duplicate. But as he’s raping her in a gilded hotel room, an assassin slips in and kills him with piano wire—this was one of the most disturbing sex scenes I’ve ever watched, and it happens in the first 10 minutes—from here, the movie turns even creepier.

Instead of killing her for witnessing murder, the state sends Dominika to State School No. 4, on the edge of the world. There she is turned into a sparrow—a ruthless, sexy assassin—with a bunch of other military recruits. Dominika does not follow the terrifying matron’s orders—strip down in front the class, for instance—but she’s so fierce (and sexy) that the army soon sends her off on assignment, to seduce a CIA agent in Budapest and extract the name of his Russian intelligence contact.

After Jennifer Lawrence, my favorite actor was Jeremy Irons, who played the Russian mole, General something or other. The reason I loved Jeremy Irons is because he did what he always does when he plays a non-British role: he started out with the required non-British accent, then slid back into his usual distinguished brogue ¾ of the way through the movie. If anyone else did this it would make me laugh out loud, but for some reason it makes me love Jeremy Irons more—it’s like his real voice is an old friend, peeking out from under a Russian general’s mask. Jennifer Lawrence manages to speak English with a Russian accent (and occasionally, Russian) so well that I didn’t notice it, I believed she was a young Russian spy.

The CIA man, Nate Nash (played by Joel Edgerton), on the other hand, was the weak link in the cast. He wasn’t believable as a spy—too dumpy, too bland, too slow on the draw. I don’t mean that in a cruel way, but when every Russian agent is young, gorgeous, and lethal, you can’t have the only American agent plodding along with a receding hairline and bad breath and expect me to believe America will win this thing (which the movie does). Though it also acknowledges—and Eastern fear porn movies rarely do—that Americans are largely oblivious to the world stage. “Drunk on social media” is how the matron of the state school puts it. And she’s right, Americans are slow to realize what’s happening in our own country. Willfully ignorant, maybe. And I say that with compassion and the true desire for us all to wake up and break the shackles of the banks, corporate media, and soulless social media. C’mon over to Steemit, people.

Okay, back to the review proper. I won’t say much more about the plot—it veers into torture, espionage staring contests, and a lot of men vs. women tricks—but I will talk about the sets and costumes, which were gorgeous. Jennifer Lawrence would look good in sackcloth, but here she’s in sparkly cocktail dresses, flawless suits, and long camel hair coats. She’s pretending to be a wealthy, well dressed white Russian—and then becomes one.

The movie shows the inside of Moscow’s theaters, glamorous old hotels, and its wide avenues. The director, Francis Lawrence, knows when to slow shots down—I liked watching Dominika’s mouth subtly firm or loosen up depending on what lie she needs to escape. The soundtrack was also well paced, it swelled dramatically at the right moments and backed off at others. The violence was not constant, but it was bad enough that I decided to go home and watch cheerful children’s anime for an hour to flush out my mind—afterwards, I still loved "Red Sparrow".

Star rating? Four out of five. I was absorbed for the whole two and a half hours and left the theater wanting to learn jujitsu.