Red Sparrow hits 4K, Blu-ray, and DVD May 22.
It’s clear that over the course of their three Hunger Games films together, Jennifer Lawrence and Francis Lawrence developed a rapport and a shared trust between star and director. Red Sparrow represents a major leap of faith for both parties, but only one half of the partnership can be said to have truly held up their end of the bargain.
As Red Sparrow kicks off, Dominika (Lawrence) is an acclaimed and popular ballerina, supporting both herself and her ill mother through her dance. A career-ending injury sends her into a tailspin and derails everything. Dominika grows so desperate that she seeks out her notoriously shifty uncle Ivan (Matthias Schoenaerts), a senior officer in Russian Intelligence. Ivan agrees to help her and her mother, on the condition that Dominika seduces a key political figure. The night doesn’t go as planned, and it’s not long before a bloody, traumatized Dominika is offered a choice: Die, which will insure there were no witnesses as to what happened in that hotel room, or give her life to the service.
Meanwhile, Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton) is a CIA operative working out of Moscow. Nash has a top-secret mole working near the very top of Russian Intelligence, code-named “Marble”, but things take a bad turn when a rendezvous is nearly exposed and Nash blows his own cover to protect Marble’s identity. Nash’s CIA superiors relocate him to Budapest in the hope that Marble will come out of hiding to make contact with him again. Ivan, determined to suss out the mole, tasks Dominika with seducing Nash and extracting the traitor’s name from him.
Red Sparrow boils down to a dance between Dominika and the two men vying to claim and control, but the sidelines are loaded with additional players in the game. Jeremy Irons and Ciarán Hinds turn up as Ivan’s superiors, while Charlotte Rampling turns in a truly freaky performance as “Matron”, the headmaster at the school where Dominika is transformed into a “Sparrow”. Mary-Louise Parker shows up for a brief, spirited turn as a compromised American official who becomes instrumental in this international chess match.
But all of it comes back to Jennifer Lawrence, and her performance here is a sterling reminder of why she exploded into the popular consciousness the way she did. The accent is occasionally spotty, but Lawrence is nonetheless riveting from first moment to last. As with Katniss in The Hunger Games, men and women in power find Dominika important because they believe she can be malleable to whatever cause or purpose they desire, but as with Katniss, there is an iron will within Dominika that cannot bend and will not bend. Also like Katniss, Dominika’s refusal to be anyone but herself proves a potent weapon in a world filled with lies and double-speak. Rather than going with the cover story provided to her by Russian Intelligence, Dominika flat-out tells Nash who she is, which of course only endears him to her even more.
What game Dominika is actually playing isn’t clear until the very end of the film, but even playing a character whose motivations and intentions are obfuscated, Lawrence never leaves you in doubt of the person or soul struggling through the bloodshed and the torments. And there is such bloodshed. And there are so many torments. As in mother!, Lawrence at times seems engaged in something closer to an endurance test than a performance. She is bared, body and mind and soul, and it is a testament to Lawrence’s abilities as a screen presence that even still she never seems like she has lost control of her own image. Her nudity in this film is the furthest thing from titillating, and it shows both actress and character have a full awareness of how their body is viewed as both possession and weapon, and using that to their own ends.
Jennifer Lawrence delivers exactly the sort of performance needed to carry a great film, but unfortunately Francis Lawrence does not deliver the great film she and her performance deserved. Red Sparrow’s greatest stumbling block is that for all its ponderous length, for all its at-times pornographic violence and repulsive violations, for all its steadfast seriousness and absolute refusal to ever be any fun whatsoever, for all that, it’s still largely telling the same spy story we’ve seen done a thousand times before (including recently) and not bringing anything all that fresh to the table.
(Side note: In general, can we be done with ‘find the mole’ scavenger hunts in spy movies? It worked, kind of, in Atomic Blonde, but mostly only because Atomic Blonde openly played the mole hunt as a pointless circle-jerk that the spies were wasting their time on while actual global change happened in the background. But Red Sparrow, and others like it, are just regurgitating Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy ad nauseum — it doesn’t help that Red Sparrow is a blood relative to the recent Tinker movie thanks to the presence of Hinds, once again playing a senior official/potential mole.)
While Francis Lawrence remains a first-rate visual director (the film is GORGEOUS on Blu), he never finds a pulse to the proceedings, and he ultimately strands his leading lady. Maybe if the romantic tension between Dominika and Nash was more tangible this could have slid, but Edgerton (whom I often like) makes a frustratingly bland leading man here. Dominika is chosen not just to give Nash someone to seduce, but to give him someone to rescue, with the Russians hoping to play off the spy’s over-abundance of empathy and sentimental streak. There’s a great, cold-blooded thriller to be made with that sort of set-up, but Edgerton doesn’t sell the notion that Nash’s heart blinds him to his head, which again puts even more weight on Jennifer Lawrence to carry this thing across the finish line by sheer force of will.
And she mostly does! I hesitate to say that all her fans should run out and watch Red Sparrow, if only because you have to watch her suffer through Christ-like levels of physical and emotional mortification, but she is genuinely remarkable to watch in this film. Had this film come later in the year, she would almost certainly be in conversation for another Oscar, and who knows, maybe if there are slim pickings this year, she will be anyway.
For fans of spy fiction, Red Sparrow is an exceedingly handsome but overly familiar exercise. I wish the film had either better realized its ambitions or at least had the self-awareness to cut loose and be a kinky roller-coaster ride. Instead, Red Sparrow ends up like Dominika: caught between two identities, never fully able to settle on who it wants to be.
Get it at Amazon:
4K | Blu-ray | Amazon Video