Red Joan

I am a fan of espionage movies and of Judi Dench so Red Joan has been on my radar for the last few weeks.  I had the chance to see it last night and I had a somewhat mixed reaction to it.  Joan Stanley (Dench) is an 80-year-old woman who likes to potter in her suburban garden when she is arrested by the Special Branch for violating the Official Secrets Act.  She is accused of giving vital information to the Soviet Union which hastened their development of an atomic bomb after World War II.  As she is interrogated, there are flashbacks to her time as a brilliant physics student at Cambridge University during the war.  Young Joan (Sophie Cookson) becomes involved with radical politics when she meets Sonya (Tereza Srbova) and Leo (Tom Hughes), who are both Communists.  She and Leo become lovers and, when she gets a job with a top-secret group of British scientists working on nuclear fission, he eventually recruits her as a KGB agent run by Sonya.  The action moves very, very slowly (there were many times when my mind wandered) and having the narrative move back and forth between the past and the present removes a lot of the tension that a traditional espionage thriller might inherently have.  Judi Dench is given very little to do but stare off into space as she remembers her past.  Her talents are definitely wasted in this role.  However, I really liked young Joan's character arc.  She naively falls for the dashing Leo and succumbs to his charms every time he comes back into her life but she ultimately realizes that he is using her and in the end she uses him for her own idealistic motives.  Cookson gives a great performance that is incredibly thought-provoking and Hughes is so charismatic, especially during a speech he gives at a rally (you can totally see why Joan falls under his spell).  Despite an interesting premise and some good performances, the pacing, structure, and lack of intrigue make this a bit underwhelming.