“Red Sparrow” and “Foxtrot”
Francis Lawrence’s sex-and-espionage thriller, starring Jennifer Lawrence, and Samuel Maoz’s story of an Israeli soldier’s death.
Jennifer Lawrence plays an asset trained to seduce in Francis Lawrence’s film.
Silly foreign accents. Who needs ’em? If you are playing a Nazi in a Hollywood movie, say, you have three options. One, you speak German, and you are subtitled. Two, you speak in your normal tone, and your German identity is implied and understood. Then, there is the third and most common option, which defies all logic: you enter a weird catarrhal limbo that requires you to expectorate the words in English with a heavy Gothic croak. That might make sense if you were addressing your English-speaking enemy in his own tongue, but, no, you must maintain the habit even when talking to your fellow-Germans—or, as they would call themselves, Tchermansz, since they indulge in the same nonexistent patois. Who laid down this risible rule? And which actor has ever felt anything but discomfort when asked to obey it? Thank heaven for major players like Sean Connery, who are wise enough (and major enough) to treat it with disdain. As the captain of a Russian submarine in “The Hunt for Red October” (1990), he delivered his lines in purest unadulterated Connery, and nobody complained. What a shtar.
The old problem resurfaces, with world-class clunkiness, in Francis Lawrence’s “Red Sparrow,” which features, among other talents, Jeremy Irons, Charlotte Rampling, and Ciarán Hinds, each of whom is blessed with a voice of delectable resonance and depth. Sadly, all three of them play Russians, the result being that, when called upon to converse, they have to turn the Slavic dial up to eleven. And the result of that is that we stop listening to what is actually being said. The look on Irons’s face toward the end, as he winds down with a cigar, a glass of brandy, and no dialogue, is one of hallowed relief.
The story, set in the present day, and adapted by Justin Haythe from the novel by Jason Matthews, tells of Dominika Egorova (Jennifer Lawrence), a prima ballerina with the Bolshoi, who becomes slightly less prima when another dancer lands on her shin. In search of an alternative career, she goes to her uncle Vanya (Matthias Schoenaerts). If you expect the rest of the film to be set on a country estate, with a drooping doctor and an elderly nurse who knits, prepare to be disappointed, for this Vanya belongs to the state security service. He thinks that Dominika would make an excellent sparrow—a professional seductress, trained to pitch her woo at malleable foes of the motherland. To this end, she is sent to a special school, where Matron (Rampling) gives frosty instruction in the carnal arts, while decrying the weakness of the West, which she describes as “drunk on shopping and social media.” How unlike Russia, where everyone stays home, quite sober, writing letters in longhand and reading Pushkin.
The heroine is given a delicate task. She is to travel to Budapest, where she must meet and melt a C.I.A. agent, Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton), who is handling a Russian mole. Nate’s bosses, however, alert to Dominika’s game, order him to entrap her, so that she can be coaxed into spying for the Americans. The plot burrows this way and that, and the mole-work grows so frantic that the movie starts running out of lawn. By and large, I enjoy being gulled by narrative scheming, but in this case I soon gave up, since none of the characters has a fate worth bothering with. If you really crave secrets, try “Dishonored” (1931), in which Marlene Dietrich is offered a similar chance at espionage. Naturally, she accepts (“What appeals to me is the chance to serve my country”), and caresses the fur of her collar. She is already spying on herself. Her very smile is a twist.
Still, bewitching isn’t everything, so what else can “Red Sparrow” entice us with? Thrills? Well, the nearest we get to a car chase comes in London, where Nate, driving a van, decides to take an exit ramp on his way to Heathrow Airport. Sex? With one Lawrence directing and another in the principal role, there was reason to pray that the loving, too, would be of Lawrentian strength. Sadly, the passion that flames between Dominika and Nate is doused within seconds, though he does bring her a nice cup of coffee in the morning. The rest of “Red Sparrow” is glum, protracted, and needlessly nasty, with two attempted rapes and a charming scene in which Nate, tied to a chair, has patches of skin shaved off like Parmesan. As for Jennifer Lawrence, she is one of those unfortunate stars, like Mark Wahlberg, whose crescent fame has made them less interesting to watch. She spends much of the new film looking blank and sculpted, and all the double-dealings lend her not a tincture of mystery. “Every human being is a puzzle of need,” we are told. Not this one.
At the start of “Foxtrot,” a woman faints. Her name is Dafna Feldman (Sarah Adler), and she has just been informed that her son Jonathan (Yonatan Shiray), a corporal in the Israeli Army, has been killed on active service. Soldiers are at her door, and we realize, with a shudder, how practiced they are at the breaking of bad news. One of them, syringe at the ready, kneels and gives Dafna an injection to sedate her. Another talks to her husband, Michael (Lior Ashkenazi), who says nothing and can barely move. The soldiers keep telling him to drink plenty of water, as if he were lost in a desert. They may have a point.
The director is Samuel Maoz, and he understands the hallucinatory force of grief—the way in which, all of a sudden, the tiniest details can seem strange, or strangely vital, to the living. A closeup shows the puncture mark on Dafna’s thigh, for instance, plus a Band-Aid that has peeled away from it, which Michael tries to stick back in place. Later, he holds his hand under a faucet, with the water steaming hot. Should this act be read as penitential, or is he testing himself for basic signs of life?
Meanwhile, the machinery of mourning grinds on. A gauche fellow from the military rabbinate shows up, suggests that “a little smile can help you cope,” and scuttles off, muttering, “May you know no more grief.” As for Jonathan’s grandmother, snowy-haired and stern (“Tuck your shirt in,” she says to Michael), she suffers from dementia and fails to grasp the enormity of the loss. Then we get a surprise—too much to reveal here, but enough to prove that Maoz has no intention of cleaving to the tragic path. Still to come: dance numbers, camel gags, an unexpected burst of animation, and cans of potted meat bubbling like cauldrons over a naked flame. We also hear a scurrilous story, worthy of Philip Roth, about a Bible, treasured after the Holocaust as a family heirloom, which the teen-age Michael reportedly swapped for a porn magazine. Viewers may feel that they are caught in a cruel farce.
The structure is that of a triptych. From the Feldmans’ apartment, we jump back to the muddy middle of nowhere—a lonely checkpoint, guarded by Jonathan and three comrades in arms. Gradually, their living space, a large metal container, tips sideways into a mire, but little else disturbs their days, apart from the occasional Arabic-speaking citizens who drive up and ask to cross the barrier. One woman, resplendent in an evening gown, is made to stand in the drenching rain while the soldiers confirm her identity. Trained on every vehicle is a searchlight and, in case of emergency, a machine gun. In the words of a visiting superior, a balding bully who arrives by helicopter, “Shit happens.”
Not much of it happens, to be honest, in the third and final section of the tale. We return to Michael and Dafna, who giggle hopelessly as they share a joint in the kitchen. This mild coda has stayed with me more than anything else in the movie; by now, we know something of the troubles that have, like Furies, pursued one generation after the next—the grandmother, her son, and her son’s son. “I remember thinking that I was going to be happy,” Dafna says, in one of the saddest lines in recent cinema. Some burdens are too heavy to be smoked away.
When it comes to the dramatizing of claustrophobia, Maoz is in his element. The whole of his previous feature, “Lebanon” (2009), was set inside an Israeli tank, and nobody could accuse his new work of roaming the open prairies. As the camera, perched on high, stares down at the stricken Michael, who is framed in a maze of geometric tiles, or inspects a row of soldiers in their bunks, the sense of confinement is overwhelming—if anything, too much so. Not a jot of randomness is allowed within the bounds of the movie, and everything is made to match; a splash of red paint on the wall of Jonathan’s bedroom, at home, prefigures the ragged hole in a wall through which the machine gun is aimed, as well as the bloodshed that it may yet unleash. Even the title is on double duty, referring both to the checkpoint’s call sign and to the faltering steps that Michael, when stoned, demonstrates to his wife. “No matter where you go, you always end up at the same starting point,” he explains. “Foxtrot” leads us a sorry dance, with irreproachable skill, but sometimes you long for it to break step, to quicken, and to breathe. ♦