Movie Review: America's Sweetheart, Jennifer Lawrence, Spies for Russia in "Red Sparrow"

Jennifer Lawrence plays a Russian ballerina-turned-sex-spy in icy thriller Red Sparrow.

It’s remarkable how Jennifer Lawrence became ‘America’s sweetheart’ for her stern, absolutely uncompromising performances, beginning with Winter’s Bone and The Hunger Games.

Her secret weapon is an anguished scream; not that you’d know it if you were only familiar with her goofy public persona, which often gets her dismissed. She’s the unique star who’s considered ‘overrated’ (an Oscar winner at 22!) when, actually, she’s probably still underrated.

That’s reinforced by Red Sparrow, which sees her reteam with Francis Lawrence, director of her Hunger Games sequels. Like their previous collaborations, she plays a driven, serious and brutalised victim of state-sanctioned violence who is perfectly capable of killing right back.

As Dominika Egorova, she’s forced into a Russian espionage program after her career as a prima ballerina is cut short by a dramatic, bone-snapping onstage incident. Her high-ranking officer uncle, Ivan (Matthias Schoenaerts), sends her to a ‘school’ for attractive young spies—nicknamed ‘Sparrows’—led by Matron (Charlotte Rampling), where they’re taught to act as honey traps: seduce targets and extract information, or execute, if necessary. For her first proper mission, Dominika is sicced on American agent Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton), who’s hiding out in Budapest, waiting for his mole in the Russian government to rear his head. She begins stalking him at his preferred swimming pool, because starting the seduction in bathers means the job’s half done.

With its shady Russian subterfuge and systemic abuse of women in the workplace, Red Sparrow is a movie of the moment. (Lawrence—who saw her private photos hacked and published, fought for fair pay and been made to comment on Harvey Weinstein’s abuses—is no doubt channeling some real fury, especially in one full-frontal scene wherein she reclaims "power".) However, it’s also unstuck from time and feels like it could be taking place in any other era of the Cold War rather than just our current one (attn: Robert Mueller).

(I almost fell out of my chair when Charlotte Rampling’s Matron mentioned ‘social media’. Up to that point, I’d just naturally assumed this was set during the 1980s. I blame Lawrence’s bangs.)

Its imperceptible setting is thanks to director Francis Lawrence. He’s a cool, fastidious filmmaker who, here, prioritises recurring visual motifs. He frequently shows Dominika returning to her apartment at night, complementing it with the same camera action: snapping up from the floor to meet her, recalling a timepiece being reset to 12:00. It’d be a cliché to describe his talent as being ‘like clockwork’, yet combined with James Newton Howard’s winding score, what else can we call it?

By making it feel ‘timeless’, Red Sparrow does miss an opportunity to actively comment on the current state of relations between Russia and the United States (unlike Steven Spielberg’s superior period piece Bridge of Spies from 2015), or the sacrifices expected of women and their bodies. Justin Haythe’s screenplay, adapted from a book by Jason Matthews, prefers to focus solely on the spycraft, which is no criminal act. (Edgerton’s fellow Yankee spies, character actors Bill Camp and Sakina Jaffrey, are fun.) It keeps Red Sparrow compelling across its 140 minutes, even if it never quite leaves a lasting impression.

That said, the extreme violence will stay with you, especially a brutal, squirm-inducing knife fight that recalls Eastern Promises, which similarly had Viggo Mortensen conducting a similar trifecta to Lawrence: be naked, get slashed and act Russian. It’s an interesting new type of triathlon, that’s for sure.

Where the film most falls flat is in the sensuality stakes, which, to this story, is key. Despite sequences of ‘seduction’ training—and then, of training being put into practice—there are no sweaty palms; no goosebumps on bare skin; no hairs raised on the back of the neck. The film’s one consensual sex scene is the most awkwardly staged since Charlotte Gainsbourg confusingly straddled a motionless, fully-pantsed Michael Fassbender in The Snowman.

You can only imagine what Luca Guadagnino or Park Chan-wook or François Ozon or, hell, Janelle Monáe could have done with this salacious material. Francis Lawrence knows where to point the camera, but not where to place his bodies.

3.5/5

In Australian cinemas now. Rated MA15+ for strong themes, violence, sexual violence, sex scenes and coarse language.

Photo: Fox