The granny who came in from the cold
She was the USSR’s most unlikely spy. So what a shame this trite and dreary drama omits the full truth about . . .
RED JOAN is a dishonest film with a dishonest title. It is ‘ inspired’ by the admittedly astonishing story of Melita Norwood, who was a frail 87-year-old widow when, in 1999, she was revealed to have worked for decades as a Soviet spy.
By that time, Norwood was a mildly eccentric great-grandmother living out her days, it seemed irreproachably, in the SouthEast London suburb of Bexleyheath.
Yet from 1937 to 1972, while working for the British Non- Ferrous Metals Research Association, she had habitually passed her country’s atomic secrets to Moscow. Norwood, a committed lifelong Communist, is said to have been a more useful spy to the Kremlin than the so-called Cambridge Five.
Her double-life and eventual exposure are certainly worth dramatising, although this film is two removes from its source material, for it is based on a novel that fictionalised Norwood’s story, calling her Joan Stanley.
I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know how closely it adheres to the truth. Alas, the film and the truth are barely on nodding terms. Even the title is disingenuous. Far from being ideologically ‘red’, Joan (played in old age by Dame Judi Dench, and in her younger incarnation by Sophie Cookson) is presented here as only mildly pink.
The real Melita Norwood drank from a mug bearing a picture of Che Guevara, a small detail the film-makers are careful to include. But why Joan does so is anyone’s guess. Perhaps she thinks it’s a David Essex mug.
At any rate, when she is hauled out of her neat suburban house to be interrogated by MI5, and later questioned by the media, her rock- hard, iron- clad belief in Communism is cited by nobody, least of all herself, as the motivation for her treachery.
That, you see, is because Joan is not a Communist, but a humanitarian. She wanted Russia to have the atom bomb purely to ensure global harmony, so that the two big bullies in the playground might cancel each other out. Heck, she’s practically a contender for the Nobel Peace Prize. Naturally,
Dench acts her bedsocks off in the disappointingly little screen time she gets as Joan, even if her stock activity seems to be gazing wistfully into the middle distance, like someone trying to remember whether she’s taken her day’s COOKSON, supply of vitamin supplements. too, is well-cast, looking convincingly like Dench’s character might have in her English-rose youth. But they, and we, are badly let down by the film’s director, Sir Trevor Nunn, and the writer, Lindsay Shapero.
Nunn is a colossus of the theatre whose extremely rare forays into the movies have tended to be with play adaptations.
On screen, he does not have the directorial sleight of hand to smooth out the many bumps in Shapero’s script, which tries to have it both ways, portraying Joan as a wholesome pacifist guilty of little more than guileless naivety, while at the same time peppering us with Cold War espionage clichés: the secret camera, the park- bench assignations, the incriminating ‘gay-kiss’ photograph exposing the Foreign Office wallah to blackmail.
All this comes in a drearily familiar extended- flashback package. In fact, Dench’s wistful gazes are nothing to do with vitamin supplements: every one of them triggers a return to Joan’s salad days, beginning when she was a frightfully bright Cambridge undergraduate in love with a roguishly handsome GermanJewish immigrant called Leo (Tom Hughes).
He is also an ardent Communist
in the pay of the KGB, so when Joan later gets taken under the wing of a physics professor (Stephen Campbell Moore), who runs a team working on highly classified nuclear stuff, a spot of angry-radical pillow-talk is all it THAT takes to turn her into a traitor. and a couple of convenient radio broadcasts about the flattening of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
For Joan, as we know by now, is in thrall not just to handsome emigres but also to her own estimable conscience.
Indeed, it is so estimable that in due course the professor forgives her for sending detailed information of all his top- secret work to the Soviets, although this is more because he fancies the pants off her.
In her old age, her son (Ben Miles) forgives her, too, overcoming the shame he feels when she is first unmasked as a spy, and stoutly defending her in more ways than one, since by a happy coincidence, he is a barrister.
All this is far too trite and contrived to add up to much of a spy drama.
Melita Norwood doesn’t deserve much from the country she betrayed, but she perhaps does deserve, 14 years after her death, to have inspired a story more compelling and credible, and honest, than this.
n FROM red Joan to mad Greta, here’s another cinematic disappointment for Easter weekend: a clunker of a psychological thriller that many of you will already feel well acquainted with,