Despite the cacophonous outcries of people who think it's a Black Widow ripoff, Red Sparrow is upon us with the integrity of its source material largely intact. It's a lovely film to behold, richly detailed and determined to tell its story with the style and flair that worked so well between director Francis Lawrence and star J Law in the Hunger Games series. The problems here are that the film is tonally confused and thematically problematic, and that the screenplay is just a little too bland to keep things interesting.
I don't want to totally blame screenwriter Justin Haythe, whose successes include Revolutionary Road and whose failures include The Lone Ranger (2013). I would compare Red Sparrow more to his and A Cure for Wellness, as it attempts to do some fresh and interesting things but only marginally succeeds. Here, the story flirts with "sexpionage" as some have called it, a sort of spy style that relies heavily on sexual prowess and ingenuity to extract information and protect secrets. It's fascinating, to be sure, and J Law delivers a fascinating performance as the duplicitous protagonist. She is a killer from the start: after an injury during a ballet performance, she brutally attacks the culprits seemingly without a second thought. Yet, in turns, she appears weak and fragile, unsure, desperate, even romantic. We're never sure of the truth of her character, which makes the film endlessly watchable.
The problem comes from the other characters, and this is where things get murky. She's surrounded by equally brutal men who exploit her time and again, force her to do their bidding, torture her to make her stronger and then torture her again to break her. The women in her life are either weak, stupid, or vile, and all operate at the whims of men. Even the extent to which our protagonist has agency is up for debate (there is no clear-cut argument here). She is invited to the Sparrow program quite unwittingly and somewhat unwillingly, though her violent streak and increasingly deceptive motivations belie her unwillingness. She's aware of being used (and sometimes abused) but she actively continues in her role, perhaps because she feels she has no choice (to save her ailing mother) or because she wants revenge on the people in power (such as her charming and abusive uncle, a character I'd liken to the mother in Manchurian Candidate). Her tenuous relationship with the American spies lead her to physical torment, but she then determinedly continues her work to become a crucial asset as a double-agent.
If this thematic mess sounds a little extreme, you should know it's only my pared-down understanding of some of the stakes of this film. It's really long and really complex, and I got more than a little lost halfway through. Who is in cahoots with whom? And why? Sometimes these questions matter. Here, I think not. What matters here is the film's style, which greatly exceeds its substance. Glamorous life meets unspeakable horror in this series of games between powerful people. It's dark, cold, and vicious, brutal and sometimes difficult to watch, sexy enough but always creepy.
Feminist or not doesn't really seem to be an applicable argument here. This film espouses almost no doctrines beyond exploring a human's capacity for deception. It's not even a totally satisfying movie, and I think that might be the point. It's part of a trilogy of books, and my hope is that they all get made into films like this (Actually, now I think on it, it seems tonally akin to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which I also wanted to see more of). I don't want to say it's good or bad, even that I liked it or not, but it was by far one of the most interesting movies I've seen in some time.
IMDb: Red Sparrow
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