Trevor Nunn (2018)
Red Joan is an adaptation of Jennie Rooney’s 2014 novel of the same name. Rooney’s title character, Joan Stanley, is based on Melita Norwood (1912-2005), a British civil servant who, from 1937 until her retirement in 1972, supplied state secrets to the KGB. Norwood’s parents were both active in socialist organisations and in 1935 she married Hilary Nussbaum, a chemistry teacher and lifelong communist (he later changed his name to Norwood). The couple had one child, a daughter born in 1943, and lived unremarkably in Bexleyheath for many years. Norwood had been a member of the British Communist Party in the 1930s and seems never to have concealed her left-wing beliefs. Her espionage was revealed in 1999. Interviewed for a BBC documentary The Spying Game in the same year, she said that ‘In general I do not agree with spying against one’s country’ but that she had done so ‘to help prevent the defeat of a new system which had at great cost given ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, good education and a health service’.
Described as ‘the most important female agent ever recruited by the USSR’ (by what her Wikipedia entry acknowledges as a ‘resolutely unattributed’ source), Norwood was never prosecuted. Trevor Nunn’s film, with a screenplay by Lindsay Shapero, begins with Joan (Judi Dench) working in the garden of her semi-detached home; a screen minute later (and against distracting opening titles), there are police officers on her doorstep and she’s hustled into a car. Her questioning by the powers-that-be contrasts Joan’s geriatric frailty with the look and manner of her two interrogators (including a seriously miscast Nina Sosanya). They’re so relentless and unsmiling they might be – irony! – the representatives of a totalitarian regime. Joan is allowed to return home but only with an electronic tag for company. The sinister force of her treatment by the authorities is one of several major differences between the story of Red Joan and the facts of Melita Norwood’s life, none of them surprising.
Norwood abandoned her arts degree course at Southampton University and got a secretarial job with the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association (BNF) but it’s de rigueur in popular literature and drama for a British communist spy of her generation to have been at Cambridge in the 1930s, so young Joan (Sophie Cookson) studies there. She gets involved with student politics by accident rather than through personal conviction; she falls not under the political spell of Karl Marx but the romantic spell of the supposedly charismatic young communist Leo Galich (Tom Hughes). Instead of dropping out, she graduates in natural sciences so that, when she goes to work at BNF, the film can get mileage out of her being assumed to be an inferior being on the basis of sex. In spite of her academic qualifications, Joan is still a secretary. During World War II, BNF is engaged (to a greater extent than was actually the case) in crucial research into the development of nuclear weapons. When government ministers visit the centre and introductions are made, one of the party says to Joan, ‘And I assume you’re in charge of the tea’. The one person who appreciates and makes positive use of her excellent scientific brain is Joan’s BNF boss Professor Max Davis (Stephen Campbell Moore), who also falls in love with her. She reciprocates with divided loyalties until Leo hangs himself – an event that gives a flavour of Red Joan’s regular injections of melodrama into the narrative.
Joan passes classified information to the Soviets only for a short time and for a more specific reason than Melita Norwood gave the BBC. The secrets she shares enable the USSR to develop an atom bomb; when they do so, it’s Max who’s accused of treachery and imprisoned. Joan’s spying activities come to light in 2000 following the death of a senior foreign office mandarin, Sir William Mitchell, who is posthumously exposed as a traitor too. William is precociously senior in the civil service by the immediate post-war years (though it’s hard to see why from the way Freddie Gaminara plays him). Joan, who knew him at Cambridge, makes use of a photograph she acquires of him snogging another man, to blackmail William into arranging a deal whereby she and Max emigrate to Australia under new identities. (It’s not clear exactly when they marry or return to live in the London suburbs.) Joan justifies what she did – to her and Max’s lawyer son Nick (Ben Miles), finally to the obligatory pack of newshounds and flash bulbs that gathers in her front garden – on the grounds that she thought it imperative that the great powers were on an equal footing in terms of nuclear capability, in order to reduce the chances of nuclear war. No one, of course, can say that the intervening half century has proved her wrong. The film can therefore present Joan as not only a moral heroine but also, since it’s largely ignored the detail of her own politics, a virtually apolitical one.
Lindsay Shapero’s screenplay is an unfortunate concoction of dull predictability, florid improbability and, at least in the use Trevor Nunn has made of the script, carelessness. (An example: Joan at Cambridge is characterised as demurely self-effacing – when she takes issue with Leo et al at a political meeting there, her confident candour comes out of nowhere then goes back into cold storage.) Nunn is now in his eightieth year but this is only his fourth cinema film (the first, probably still the best-known, was his Ibsen adaptation Hedda, back in 1975). To judge from Red Joan, we can be grateful he’s been kept so fruitfully occupied doing theatre. Two moments that both involve tea sum up his tame, clumsy direction. Back at home from her police grilling, Joan brews up; as she carries her drink from kitchen into living room, an emphatic close-up on the old radical’s tea mug reveals the image of Che Guevara. (This is pretty well the level on which the protagonist’s political views are explored.) Back in the 1940s, young Joan meets with another key Cambridge associate, Leo’s sister Sonya (Teresa Srbova): the scene is introduced by the camera underlining a ‘Tea Rooms’ sign and Glen Miller-ish music on the soundtrack. Nunn seems to think this must be the way to do it in a movie because he’s seen and heard as much often before.
If the Wikipedia article on Melita Norwood is to be believed, Red Joan may not be wrong in showing Joan as single-handedly responsible for enabling the Soviet Union quickly to copy the British recipe for an atom bomb – but it does this so crudely that it renders the idea ludicrous. At the same time, the film is often pedestrian. George Fenton has tried to be helpful and suggest otherwise with a dramatic score (albeit a conventional one). Trevor Nunn makes liberal use of it, as if to convince himself he’s delivering an intensely exciting story.
I bought a ticket only because of Judi Dench – feeling again that it’s irresponsibly ungrateful not to take advantage of seeing her while she’s still working, feeling guilty too that I didn’t see her in Kenneth Branagh’s recent All is True because it looked naff in the trailer. I’m glad to that extent that I saw Red Joan (in spite of its naff trailer). As usual, Dench inhabits her character completely. Her sight is failing now but she manages to use even this to expressive advantage: her cloudy eyes give a sense of Joan’s shrouded past. She has less screen time here than Sophie Cookson, whom I don’t recall seeing before and liked. It’s not easy to take on a role knowing the person you’re playing will turn into Judi Dench: Cookson’s blend of modesty, strong will and distinctive intelligence make her a very credible forerunner. It’s not her fault that she’s eventually defeated by the mechanical crises that the screenplay imposes.
In their scenes together on a wartime ocean journey to Canada, Cookson and Stephen Campbell Moore have a chance, and take it, to get some kind of rhythm between them going. It gives a grounding to Joan’s relationship with Max that only exposes the falsity of their later, melodramatic exchanges – again, not the actors’ fault. Some of the younger players are pretty ropy, though: if attention-grabbing Teresa Srbova and stiff, weak Freddie Gaminara combined their histrionic energy and split it down the middle, they might both be rather better. The cast member I felt sorriest for was Ben Miles, a fine actor saddled with a succession of clichés meant to dramatise Nick Stanley’s shocked discovery of his mother’s past. At one point, Nick asks Joan how much his father knew and she replies, ‘Enough’. Assuming that everything revealed to the viewer about Joan and Max’s personal history is revealed to Nick too, it’s unforgivable that Ben Miles is denied the opportunity to react to this. Instead, in the final scene, he’s simply forgiven his mother and literally stands beside her, to tell the assembled press, ‘I am her lawyer – and her son’.
23 April 2019
