Perhaps it was the passage of the material through so many stages that led to a film that comes across as surprisingly starchy, stilted and clichéd.It begins with elderly Joan Stanley (Dench) answering a knock on the door of her London home to find a couple of government agents, who promptly accuse her of violations of the espionage act and place her under arrest. Premise. Eventually she will admit her guilt, asking her incredulous son Nick (Ben Miles), a barrister, to represent her in court if necessary.Back in the late thirties, mousy Joan (played by Sophie Cookson) was studying science at Cambridge when she met flamboyant Sonya (Tereza Srbova), a Jewish refugee from Germany, and her handsome cousin Leo (Tom Hughes), with family roots in Russia.

There’s a potentially rich story in Melita Norwood’s life that is barely tapped in this tepid refashioning of it. Throughout the story, there is a tension between Joan’s intelligence, sensible attitude to life, and willingness to ask uncomfortable questions on the one hand, and her conventional or traditionally feminine attitudes on the other. In a simple but touching finale, the conflicts among ethics, loyalty, patriotism, and personal responsibility – of “loyalty to nation vs loyalty to humanity” as Nunn expressed it – which Joan had struggled with are made clear by the simple statement of her much older self.It is not necessary to either approve or disapprove of Joan’s espionage in order to appreciate her story. Their relationship is consistently disappointing to her, as the politically zealous Leo avoids emotional commitment on principle; actress Sophie Cookson, who plays the young Joan, remarked that they are forever at odds in that Joan “acted mainly despite politics,” while Leo was “all politics.”  After graduation, she takes a job with a research firm involved in the early stages of developing atomic weapons. Red Joan is an adaptation of the very readable novel of the same name by Jennie Rooney, which was in turn inspired by the life of Melita Norwood, a British woman who was discovered at age 87 to have been a spy for the KGB many years earlier. When a distinguished actress and an equally distinguished stage director collaborate on a film, one hopes for something special. As the older Joan explains, her political attitudes had developed when Sonya and Leo suffered discrimination because of their views and a tragedy occurred, but it was not until Hiroshima that she decided to transmit atomic secrets to the Soviets. Red Joan is based on a novel of the same name written by Jennie Rooney, which was itself inspired by the life of Melita Norwood. Mrs Stanley herself seems every bit the sweet, harmless old lady her family and neighbours take her to be. In “Red Joan,” a slightly dull drama “inspired by a true story,” Judi Dench plays an Englishwoman in her 80s, whom we see in opening scenes trimming a hedge in … Red Joan spends most of its running time in the past, tracking Joan’s fearful life during WWII and seeing the catastrophic destruction of America’s atomic weapons on Japan. During the war, Joan went to university and became an esteemed scientist herself, eventually joining the top secret team that was charged with developing Britain’s own bomb with the help of the Canadians. Nunn’s “Joan” may be red, but dramatically it’s definitely not red-hot.

It is at this point it becomes clear that almost everyone has misjudged and underestimated Joan, her ideas, her intentions, and her personal integrity: not only those who knew her, who saw her as sentimental, weak, and easily led, but as it turns out, the audience as well. Trevor Nunn regards Joan as “an intelligent woman whose conclusions were not based entirely on politics.” He finds her courageous, in fact, and compares her to the mother of Coriolanus, an ordinary woman who faces an army to save a city. The remainder of the film jumps back and forth between her interrogation and explanatory flashbacks to the events she’s being questioned about. Without thinking about it much, she’d become a part of a communist cell, which also included slick William Mitchell (Freddie Gaminara).With the outbreak of World War II, Joan, with her background in physics, became an assistant to Professor Max Davies (Stephen Campbell Moore), a major figure in a British project to develop an atomic bomb. The story of Joan Stanley, who was exposed as the K.G.B. While it appears that she did what she was accused of doing my take-away is that Melita was a naive young woman who did the wrong thing for (in her estimation) the right reasons. Her choices were driven by events in her life and in the world, and by her own quietly but firmly held beliefs, far more than by the Communist ideology Sonya and Leo tried to instil in her.

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