Matthias Schoenaerts – Memphis Flyer

Since around August 1991, there’s been something missing from American films: A good stock villain. That’s when the Russian Communist Party ceased to exist, the Soviet Union dissolved, and the Cold War, a nebulous conflict without a clear start date, officially came to an end. Millions around the globe who had lived their entire lives under the specter of nuclear annihilation breathed a sigh of relief. Freedom, democracy, and capitalism stood triumphant. But action and spy movies never recovered.

The Russians had been such good villains for us, the yang to our yin. The Soviets of movie lore were just as capable and well funded as their Western counterparts, but their fanatical adherence to an ideology we only half understood made them much more ruthless. Where would James Bond be without From Russia With Love? Rotting away in some flea-bitten colonial capital, keeping the locals subdued for the Queen, probably. The Russian threat, even dressed up as SPECTRE, gave him purpose and meaning. In the post-Cold War period, Bond would fight international criminal cartels and terrorists, but it just wasn’t the same. Nobody had that bad guy zing like the Russkies.

Well I’ve got good news for fans of international intrigue and the possibility of death by cleansing nuclear fire! The Russians are back! And this time they’re sexier than ever! We’re talking Jennifer Lawrence sexy here, people. Lawrence, fresh from dumping Darren Aronofsky because he Would. Not. Shut. Up. about their arthouse embarrassment mother!, plays Dominika Egrova, a made-up name for a Bolshoi ballerina if ever I heard one. Dominika is nearing the peak of a promising career on Moscow’s biggest stage when a gruesome injury throws her life into ruins. Her father is dead, her mother is an invalid, and, as anyone who has recently watched I, Tonya could tell you, there’s not much of a job market for hobbled ballerinas. That’s when her uncle, Ivan Dimitrevich Egorov (Matthias Schoenaerts) makes her an offer she can’t refuse.

Let me pause here to say I love the character of Ivan, and not just because he has the laziest possible made-up name for a Russian bad guy. Everything about Schoenaerts as Ivan is designed to push your Bond movie buttons. If this were 1963, he would be working for the KGB. As it is, he works for the SVR. Even his haircut and the impeccable tailoring of his suits resemble Red Grant, Bond’s nemesis in From Russia With Love.

If Schoenaerts is Red Grant, then Charlotte Rampling is Krebs, the matronly SPECTRE agent with the switchblade shoe. Rampling is even called “Matron” by the collection of would-be super spies in the notorious school where Dominika is sent to learn her trade craft, which consists mostly of picking locks and being very sexy. “The Cold War did not end!” she exclaims, before making Dominika and a tovarisch date raper with the completely authentic name Dimitri Ustinov (Kristof Konrad) strip and get it on for the class.

Dominika doesn’t spend long at spy school, as she quickly grows too ruthless and edgy even for the Cold War relics in charge. She’s sent into the field to root out a mole by seducing CIA agent Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton), whose name is totally not just made up to sound cool. Thus begins round after round of double, triple, and quadruple crosses with a salchow twist. Everybody betrays everyone else, and plots too complex to even follow if you’re taking notes (I was) pile up like leaves falling in Gorky Park.

Here’s the thing about Red Sparrow. It’s completely ridiculous, way too long, and yet also, somehow entertaining. A lot of that probably comes down to Lawrence, who pretty much just brazens her way through the proceedings with her movie star’s physical confidence. Lawrence earns her paycheck, which, given the nude scenes, must have been substantial. And really, isn’t elevating mediocre material by sheer charisma pretty much the job description of a movie star? Lawrence’s accent never stabilizes, but her lock jaw inscrutability takes inspiration from Best Actress winner Frances McDormand as her eyes whisper “Zees men are pigs. I vill control zem.”

I can’t help but think Red Sparrow works as well as it did for me because I watched it right after reading The New Yorker‘s extended exegesis of the Steele Dossier. It may make for an eye rolling film plot, but blinding powerful men with boobies and then blackmailing the hell out of them apparently works like a charm. Just look around.

The bucolic British countryside, like pornography, has a preordained end. BBC Films like Far from the Madding Crowd, which haunt our PBS stations and Academy Awards, are full of restrained and elevated diction and dress working their way to release.

Far from the Madding Crowd enriches this formula by placing Carey Mulligan front and center, often photographed in front of beautifully filmed landscapes as if green-screened there. Mulligan is great at registering emotions on her face and working to sequester them in her mouth. With a shock of mad-scientist hair dribbling over her forehead and a triple set of dimples, she constantly looks left and right and communicates sharply whatever her character won’t say.

Her costar Matthias Schoenaerts is a great match as Gabriel Oak, a beautifully bearded, aptly named rugged bit of handsome restraint. Their meet-cute over sheep is edited briskly, the vibrant colors of her dresses and the rolling hills changing to suggest even the editor is bored with this genre. As the film starts, it’s a pleasure to watch Mulligan turn down a series of too-sudden marriage proposals: She comes off like a modern girl in a world of traditional male suitors.

Carey Mulligan and Tom Sturridge

But unfortunately, as an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s early novel, the movie cannot go where the casting and early scenes suggest and create a kind of In the Mood for Love for Wessex. Nods toward the difficulty of being a woman in a patriarchal agrarian society are made. Work is something mostly offscreen or metaphorical and delegated to peasant types. The English-speaking past is exoticized as a place where mildly aristocratic people can get over their shyness and find love.

As always, animal husbandry and farming are there to give something elemental: Udders are milked, fields shine, tadpoles are glimpsed in pools, but there is a remove — you know none of these details will touch the main plot or heroine. Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights did this, but better. The brutality of everyday animal murder on a farm, which looked real but was fake, sold both the violent passions of the narrative and the alien nature of the past through the outsider protagonist’s eyes.

Here, the dark melancholy of later Hardy books isn’t fully formed in the plot. The most evocative non-romantic bit comes early, when Oak’s sheep get herded off a cliff to smash on a beach and Oak bitterly shoots the responsible dog. That rough-hewn shock gives way to a standard plot and two well-cast but underwritten suitors. Michael Sheen’s Boldwood is all obsession and stammering. Tom Sturridge’s Sergeant Troy has a pool-cue nose, pert moustache, and pouty lips straight out of villain central casting. But they lack definition, and when the story jumps forward in ellipsis and suggestion, we don’t know how to take it. The pair primarily embody the two mistakes of marrying for sex and money, but only that. There’s a great bit where Troy drops his caddiness as he talks to his pregnant ex-girlfriend. It suddenly seems like the story will be jarringly modern, and the characters will mutually recognize that while illegitimate pregnancy in the 1800s may be a scandal, financial accommodation for destitute mothers is a must.

Likewise Troy’s erotic and possibly metaphorical sword prowess demonstration in the woods is another nicely jarring bit where the movie suddenly seems like it could go anywhere other than the regular stops. Sex might not result in shame. Choosing the wrong first boyfriend might be an ordinary misstep. But the movie adheres to Hardy’s plot without enthusiasm. A late murder is not set up well, and the body lands like a feather.

What works are Mulligan and Schoenaerts. Arguing over a scythe sharpener, degasifying the bellies of sheep, working to cover phallic haystacks in the rain, their sly rapport is better than the plot. Mulligan so often does this kind of character well. In Never Let Me Go and Drive, she played restrained characters who interact painfully with the world. But those worlds were weirder. Here, director Thomas Vinterberg, one of the Dogme 95 creators, is far too normal. Mulligan’s character avers her independence constantly, to the end uninterested in affirming marriage proposals, even as she is stuck in a movie operated by their mechanics.