Mr. Jones: With an uneven plot and a profound and powerful silent act, Agnieszka Holland wades into Ukraine's Holodomor
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B-minus
Polish director Agnieszka Holland (Europa, Europa, In Darkness) once again explores Europe’s traumatic 20th-century history, in Mr. Jones, the real-life story of an idealistic young Welsh journalist, Gareth Jones (James Norton) who exposed the genocidal famine, or Holodomor, inflicted on Ukraine in 1932-33.
Stalin’s decision, during the first of his Five Year Plans, was to take the entirety of Ukraine’s wheat yield to finance the Soviet Union’s industrial modernization, which led to the death of millions of ethnic Ukrainians.
Welsh journalist Gareth Jones (James Norton) is haunted by what he finds in Stalin’s Ukraine in Mr. Jones
At the center of Holland’s film, is a powerful, largely dialogue-free segment reminiscent of Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, in which the starving young journalist wades through snow drifts, avoiding murderous troops and discovering starving or dead families inside their homes.
The problem is, the rest of the film is precariously uneven. There’s a timely resonance to the framing story - dealing with the Soviet Union and the mainstream Western press’s complicity in discrediting of Jones’ first-hand reportage as fake news. But it is encumbered by an ungainly screenplay from first-time screenwriter Andrea Chalupa, who has put extensive research onscreen without distilling it into a cohesive narrative.
At 140 minutes, the movie includes, not only the famine, but a talky political drama, lots of creaky thriller tropes, and an extensive digression involving the author Eric Blair - aka George Orwell - and his creation of the Stalinist allegory, Animal Farm, purportedly inspired by Jones’ findings. An introductory scene sees Orwell (Joseph Mawle) banging on his typewriter and recommending in voice-over that readers “read between the lines” of his book.
Next, we meet the nerdy, bespectacled, Cambridge-educated Gareth Jones, who, at 27, was employed by Britain’s Foreign Office. Having secured an interview with Hitler on the Fuhrer’s private plane, he is terrified for Europe’s future. But his warnings of the impending Nazi German threat are met with sniffy skepticism, soon followed by his dismissal.
Subsequently, Jones secures a journalist’s visa to Russia, where he meets fellow embedded foreign reporters, including the real-life New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent/propagandist Walter Duranty (a slithery Peter Sarsgaard). Duranty spends his well-paid time in drug-fueled orgies and spinning Politburo-friendly copy.
Also working in Duranty’s bureau is sultry English journalist, Ada Brooks (Vanessa Kirby, who played Princess Margaret in The Crown) doing double duty as a source and as Gareth’s femme fatale romantic interest.
Spurred by rumours of the famine, and the suspicious death of another journalist investigating the story, the multilingual Jones succeeds in slipping away from his Soviet minders to the trauma zone, on a train ride accompanied by Soviet propaganda footage. What follows is the central scene, a sustained dialogue-free sequence shot with low angles and desaturated colours, of frozen corpses, crowded trains and orphaned children in the snow, which forms the haunted heart of the film.
Inevitably, Jones is caught, and granted his freedom in exchange for his silence, along with the lives of six British engineers who have been imprisoned on false accusations of spying (and who are used as a bargaining chip in Jones’ return).
Back in England, everything becomes anticlimactic when we return to politicking, long speeches and the over-familiar thriller trope of triumph by publication. Jones finds encouragement from no less than the great Orwell to tell his truth, despite the disinformation campaign of The Times’ Duranty. Finally, back in his Welsh village, Jones gets to use some skullduggery to gain the ear of the world when no less than William Randolph Hearst (Matthew Marsh), rents out a nearby holiday villa.
If you can unshackle the film from its creaky thriller frame, Mr. Jones is a well-intended history lesson and one-dimensional inspirational reminder of one reporter’s moral clarity in the fight against totalitarian deception. To paraphrase Ballad of a Thin Man, Bob Dylan’s song about a journalist of the same name, there is something going on here, and Mr. Jones knows exactly what it is.
Click HERE to read Bonnie Laufer’s interview with director Agnieszka Holland.
Directed by Agniezka Holland. Written by Andrea Chalupa. Starring James Norton, Vanessa Kirby, and Peter Sarsgaard. Mr. Jones is available on video on demand from June 22.