It’s 2000 and Joan Stanley, an elderly woman who lives amidst the photographs of her children and grandchildren, nervously answers a knock on the door. It’s Special Branch, Britain’s political police, come to arrest her for violating the Official Secrets Act. Specifically, she’s accused of passing atomic secrets to the Soviets in the unsettled aftermath of World War II. From the look on her face, Joan was expecting that knock on her door for years.
Based on Jennie Rooney’s novel, Red Joan is a heavily romanticized retelling of an actual spy story of espionage committed by a secretary in Britain’s wartime nuclear program. The film’s strength is the careful performance by Judi Dench as the elderly Joan, looking slightly befuddled at some moments and shifty-eyed at others as the police interrogation continues. With subtle facial language, Dench undermines Joan’s denials. She’s not telling everything she knows.
Dench is supported by a capable cast. Sophie Cookson plays Joan at Cambridge in the 1930s and ’40s. The bookish young innocent, perhaps the university’s only female physics major, is drawn into communist circles by glamorous Jewish refugee Sonya (Tereza Srbova), but more deeply by her brother Leo (Tom Hughes, familiar to PBS audiences as Prince Albert in “Victoria”).
Entranced by Leo, Joan holds up signs at his rallies and eventually falls into his bed. But unlike her peer group, she’s no fool. Joan is the only one who questions the confessions that emerge from Joseph Stalin’s show trials, the only one not duped by the Communist Party’s promise of utopia.
Shifting effortlessly between 2000 and way back then, Red Joan tries to show how conscience can introduce uncertainty into the abstractions of particle physics. Sonya, Leo and the Cambridge gang are manipulative, trying to wheedle information from Joan by any means. “The Russians, they deserve the Bomb,” Leo tells her, desperately kissing her in a fumbled stab at lovemaking as propaganda. It’s not Leo but those newsreels of Hiroshima that finally nudge a guilty-feeling Joan into stealing information. Sharing the atom bomb with Stalin as a means to world peace? She wasn’t the only one who thought so.
The screenplay is sloppy with history’s details and hence careless about reality. Red Joan appears confused about the relation between Britain’s wartime nuclear program and America’s Manhattan Project. Sonya identifies herself as an agent of the KGB, an organization that didn’t exist at the time. And yet, largely on the strength of casting, Red Joan is an engaging drama that touches on an eternal theme: a doubtful past pursuing a protagonist into the present.
