Red Sparrow

Tonight we go see Red Sparrow, a spy thriller which has attracted a lot criticism. This allegedly perverse ‘15’ certificate film has been accused of being both violently and sexually perverse with woman beaten and raped seemingly at will by powerful men.

I must admit that I have been a little surprised by this reaction but then I think I was possibly too busy being annoyed at how they'd made a complete hash out of a decent book which was written by former CIA operative Jason Matthews.

Perhaps I need to re-watch it to see what I missed but I do remember they’d left out the hair brush scene (thankfully). That would have caused even more of a stir.

The story goes like this. Dominika Egorova (Jennifer Lawrence) was a ballerina at the Bolshoi whose promising dancing career was ended by injury. Sadly her dancing also funded the care for her ailing mother.

Not to worry, her uncle Ivan (Matthias Schoenaerts), who works in Russian intelligence, offers her work to help her get by. It is just a small favour he requires, for her to be the honey in a trap that is to be sprung on a Russian politician. She does the favour and does a rather good job, although it probably goes a little bit further than she would have hoped. Then just as the politician is having his way with her, he is murdered.

Unfortunately she’s now in a bit of a pickle because she’s seen too much. She is told she can either die or start working for Russian intelligence herself. Tough choice that.

So her uncle sends her off to Sparrow School where Matron (Charlotte Rampling) teaches the recruits to use the skills of sexual seduction to get what they want from the enemy.

Once graduated, Dominika is sent to Budapest to meet her target, Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton), who works for the CIA and knows the identity of a Russian mole known as Marble. However, Nash quickly sees through her and the long and short of it is that he persuades her to become a double agent.

I was a fan of the book even though it was at times convoluted and hard to follow, so a simplification was required for it to work as a film and that doesn't happen. In fact what we have here is an even more convoluted plot.

The other problem is where is the seduction? There’s a total lack of chemistry between the two agents. For someone supposedly trained in seduction, Dominika doesn’t pull any tricks out of the locker for him. In the book they have a conflicted relationship due to the nature of their jobs but a relationship nonetheless, here they eventually have a quick bonk. It's not quite the same and where was the swimming race? That was one of my favourite bits.

Instead the script seems to demand that all the Russians must be portrayed as ice men and ice maidens. So Lawrence goes through the entire film wearing only one expression, one of indifference, while Edgerton goes about attempting to be the all American hero.

In fact Lawrence seems hugely miscast in this but then so too are the likes of Charlotte Rampling, Jeremy Irons, Joely Richardson and Ciaran Hinds. Were there no genuine Russian actors available the weekend that they did the casting?

There is also no back story to the Russian mole which was pivotal to the original story, instead the film just seems overloaded with violence. It’s all deeply disappointing.

This would have made a wonderful independent flick or even a mini series but Hollywood completely wrecked this one.

Loving

Loving is based on the true story of Richard and Mildred Loving who travelled to Washington, DC from their home in Virginia to get married in 1958. The reason they travelled so far was because Richard (Joel Edgerton), a bricklayer who build their home and seemingly practically everyone else's, was a white man while Mildred (Ruth Negga) was a black woman. Unfortunately their home state was one of the remaining states that still banned marriages between whites and non-whites.

Not that getting married in another state made much difference because the local Sheriff (Martin Csokas) and his deputies soon raided their house in the early hours to enforce 'God's Law'. Presumably they were hoping to catch them having sex, which was also illegal between whites and non-whites, but had to settle for them simply sleeping side by side. When they pointed out their marriage certificate on the wall they were told that the certificate had no significance in Virginia.

The Lovings were charged with 'cohabiting as man and wife' and pleaded guilty. They were sentenced to a year in prison with the sentence suspended on condition that they left the state for 25 years. So they upped sticks and moved to Columbia.

Richard was a quiet, private man of few words who just wanted to be left in peace to live his life but his wife was more feisty and she agrees to two lawyers, Bernie Cohen (Nick Kroll) and Phil Hirschkop (Jon Bass), fighting their case. 

In the meantime, feeling frustrated by being unable to visit their families, they quietly moved back to Virginia where they live on the outskirts, trying to stay below the radar but clearly not too far below the radar as their situation gets featured in Life magazine which gives their case valuable publicity.

When the local courts find against them their lawyers take the case to the federal Supreme Court where the court decides that prohibiting interracial marriage is in fact unconstitutional.

Loving is an informative and pleasant film but a bit on the slow side, it inches along at times, but at least it’s not the overtly sentimental melodrama it could have been. Some more back story would have been nice, perhaps about how they met, and although the Lovings didn’t want to attend the court case I certainly would have liked to have done. Instead, in keeping with the rest of the film, the court’s verdict is delivered in a rather low key phone call to Mildred.