By David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh
each Friday.
Note: Nosh 102 will appear on Friday, March 23.
APPETIZER: Review of Red
Sparrow
Whatever
Soviet nostalgia Vladimir Putin has mixed into his bloody borscht of Russian
nationalism (as in his almost Stalinist displays for the 2014 Olympics in Sochi),
it finds a sinister resonance in Red
Sparrow, which seems to immerse Cold War vibes in ironic arsenic and
cold vodka. At the center they’ve put a fire that won’t douse, and that smart
fire is Jennifer Lawrence as Dominika Egorova. She is even more a bubbling samovar
of sexuality than Vivien Leigh in Anna
Karenina or Michelle Pfeiffer in The
Russia House (if not Tatiana Samoilova in The Cranes Are Flying).
The
story is post-Soviet, and Lawrence brings modern edge to it. She has a dusting
of Slavic accent, the buff build of an athlete (if not quite the silky grace for
Moscow ballerina Dominika). Her peachy-pouty beauty and bold, dynamic rhythms
are stellar but not show-offy, even in a nude scene (body double?). After a
stage injury kills her dance career, Dominika still must support her sick,
widowed mother (Joely Richardson). “The state” swoops in like an eagle, or
vulture. We sense a ruthless, masculine power hierarchy that Stalin would have
happily recognized. It is no coincidence that Dominika’s chief handler and
cynical helper, Uncle Vanya (Matthias Schoenaerts), is a suave, official
schemer who looks a lot like Putin (better hair).
Dominika
becomes a “sparrow,” an agent honed to be sex bait, trained by the Matron
(Charlotte Rampling), witch-like heir to KGB assassin Rosa Klebb (Lotta Lenya) in From Russia With Love. Webbed above her
like Kremlin spiders are the purring Vanya, spy master Korchnoi (Jeremy Irons)
and sinister boss Zakharov (Ciaran Hinds). By eroticizing but not cheapening Dominika’s
motives, strategies and choices, Lawrence makes the woman’s “Russian soul” a
stream of tense, shifting options. Although the key American agent (Joel
Edgerton) is effective, the actor lacks the force to really challenge Lawrence.
With both sex and danger jiving suspense, the track-switching plot requires close
adult attention. Some nuances worthy of John Le Carré even inflect a scene of
skin-peeling torture (the peeler is a
brute who would have delighted Rosa Klebb).
Francis
Lawrence (no relation), who advanced the star with Hunger Games films, has a good sense of pace and place (Budapest,
which also subs for Moscow). For all the sparrow’s feeling for poor, sick mom and Mother Russia,
Jennifer Lawrence avoids sentimentality. The movie, while violent, avoids the
usual bang-bang junk (for that, it’s paying a price at the box office). It makes us care about tough, driven Dominika,
yet without wrapping her in a big Oprah hug of go-girlness. This is not the fun
of Lawrence in American Hustle, nor
of Lawrence getting drunk (or pretending to) on Stephen Colbert’s show. But, for
the most sensually exciting and smartly engaging female star to emerge since
Nicole Kidman and Kate Winslet, Red
Sparrow is another brave move in an exciting career.
SALAD (A List)
Twelve Major Movie Spy Performances:
Conrad
Veidt as Capt. Hardt (The Spy in Black,
1939), Ingrid Bergman as Alicia Huberman (Notorious,
1946), James Mason as Ulysses Diello (Five
Fingers, 1952), Alec Guinness as James Wormold (Our Man in Havana, 1959), James Mason as Phillip Vandamm (North by Northwest, 1959), Sean Connery
as James Bond (From Russia With Love,
1963), Michael Caine as Harry Palmer (The
Ipcress File, 1965), Richard Burton as Alec Leamas (The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, 1965), Donald Sutherland as
Faber (The Eye of the Needle, 1981),
Geoffrey Rush as Harry Penhel (The Tailor
of Panama, 2001), UIrich Mühe as Gerd Wiesler (The Lives of Others, 2006) and Gary Oldman as George Smiley (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, 2011). And
the greatest of all was on BBC-TV: Alec Guinness as Smiley in Tinker, Tailor … and Smiley’s People.
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Beyond
the biomorphic science dreams of Lamarck, Mendel, even Stalin’s fanatical Lysenko,
Orson Welles morphed the genetics of imagination: “If, as Welles insinuates in F for Fake, ‘a magician is just an actor
playing the part of a magician,’ then what is an actor? Through all the
divergent film and audio manifestations of Mr.
Arkadin, the actor is the kingfish, the pooh-bah, the high-muckety-muck.
Since Welles portrayed Harry Lime on radio’s The Third Man: The Lives of Harry Lime, the mischievous,
crepuscular Lime, and not the austere, calculating Arkadin emerged as the
mainspring of the shows. But Welles, of course, played Arkadin in the film, and
so Lime … receded to the margins.” (Quote from Robert Polito’s preface to the 2006
reprint of Welles’s novel Mr. Arkadin,
issued with the Criterion revival of the 1955 film.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
“My
baptismal splash (of film fever) was in Africa’s Ulanga River, in John Huston’s
The African Queen, which I saw in
revival. I was thrilled as Charlie (Humphrey Bogart) and Rose (Katharine
Hepburn) boat down the Ulanga. For me, their African voyage brought lessons. I
learned about framing’s psychological effect – when the Ulanga widens, our
expectations expand, and when it narrows into marshes we feel almost
suffocated. I perceived how ‘minor’ acting can suddenly feel major – when Rose’s
brother (Robert Morley) dies in fevered homesickness. I recognized the wit of
an impeccable sight gag – when Rose flings Charlie’s gin overboard, the emptied
bottles float away like tipsy giggles. I missed that clue to my future calling,
for what is criticism but the tossing of distilled opinions into an endless
river of responses?” (From the Introduction to my Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook
and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Katharine
Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart take boating to another level in The
African Queen (United Artists, 1951; director John Huston, cinematographer
Jack Cardiff).
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