“Red Joan” is a traditional production, polished as brass and as old-school diverting as a film starring Judi Dench and directed by Trevor Nunn…
“Red Joan” is a traditional production, polished as brass and as old-school diverting as a film starring Judi Dench and directed by Trevor Nunn would have to be.
But there is also a kind of hollowness at its center, a tone that is more conventional than compelling. “Red Joan’s” time frame and its loosely based-on-fact story line have intrinsic interest, but not all of that potential is realized.
Though Dench is “Red Joan’s” marquee attraction, she appears as Joan Stanley only in the film’s contemporary framing device, introduced in 2000 as a quintessentially British elderly party carefully tending to a garden of brightly blooming flowers.
No sooner are the gardening shears put away, however, than there comes a stern knock on the door and members of the national security-focused Special Branch come bursting in, arresting Joan for 27 breaches of the Official Secrets Act and accusing her of traitorous activities dating back to 1938 and her days as a student at Cambridge.
Joan’s solicitor son Nick (Ben Miles, Group Capt. Peter Townsend in “The Crown”) angrily insists there must be some mistake, his kindly old mum could not have played fast and loose with national security.
But as the title indicates, there is soon very little doubt that pass secrets Joan did. The question becomes not whether the accusations are true but how and why the deed was done.
Though older Joan periodically reappears to explain herself (“The world was so different then, you have no idea”), much of the story unfolds in flashbacks set between 1938 and 1947, and here Joan is very capably played by Sophie Cookson.
