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Red Joan fails to take advantage of Dench’s talents

Red Joan

★★ 1/2 out of 5

Cast: Judi Dench, Sophie Cookson, Stephen Campbell Moore

Director: Trevor Nunn

Duration: 1 h 40 m Talk about a double agent. The first thing you need to know going into Red Joan is that the woman on the poster, Dame Judi Dench, is not the star of the film. She plays old Joan Stanley, and mostly that requires sitting down and looking tired.

Young Joan is played by the more vivacious Sophie Cookson in a series of long and awkwardly introduced flashbacks. As a brilliant physicist in 1930s Britain, Joan is recruited by the country’s nascent nuclear industry.

Max Davis (Stephen Campbell Moore) is trying to build an atomic bomb before the Nazis — before the Americans if he can manage it — and hires Joan as his secretary on the notion that it’s good to have an assistant who understands your work.

Does she ever! In Lindsay Shapero’s screenplay, based very, very loosely on the life of British civil servant and KGB informant Melita Norwood, Joan independently hits on the idea of uranium extraction through centrifugal technology. (And she makes a mean cup of tea.) She’s mightily attracted to her boss, though as a married man she considers him off limits.

She’s also smitten with Leo (Tom Hughes), cousin of Sonya (Tereza Srbova), an older Jewish-Russian orphan polyglot Communist whom Joan meets at Cambridge.

We know from the opening frames of director Trevor Nunn’s film, set in 2000, that Joan has been arrested for spying for the Soviet Union. Her barrister son (Ben Miles) refuses to believe it, even after she serves him tea in a Che Guevara mug. But the flashbacks leave little doubt. The real story is how she came to it. Was it a honey trap? Money? Political fervour? Misguided patriotism?

The film does a good job of slowly building up the details of Joan’s life, balancing her infatuation with Leo against a stolid sense of moral pride.

Leo may kiss her and call her “my little comrade,” but she’s adamant about not revealing any details of what she’s working on for the War Office.

Though clearly something will have to change between 1938 and whenever she turns into Dench. With its pretty but low-budget production values and its wartime research setting, Red Joan may put you in mind of The Imitation Game, which featured another brilliant, underappreciated Joan, cryptanalyst Joan Clarke, played by Keira Knightley.

But Red Joan suffers a little from being twice removed from reality — the source material is the novel of the same name, itself inspired by the actual Norwood affair. And I found myself wishing that Dench had more to do: M, James Bond’s boss, as a former Soviet spy? It’s a great hook that the film ultimately fails to fully live up to.