Mr. Jones: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!****

My Rating: 2.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Not worth paying to see, but the striking and unnerving scenes of the Holomodor are worthy of your time to watch when it comes out on Netflix or cable.

Mr. Jones, directed by Agnieszka Holland and written by Andrea Chalupa, is the true story of British journalist Gareth Jones as he discovers and then reveals the horrors of Stalin’s genocidal famine in Ukraine in 1933. The film stars James Norton as Jones, with supporting turns from Vanessa Kirby and Peter Sarsgaard.

Agnieszka Holland is an interesting cinematic figure. In 1990 she wrote and directed Europa, Europa, a staggeringly brilliant film about the remarkable life of Solomon Perel during World War II for which Holland garnered a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Ever since Europa, Europa though, Holland has churned out absolutely nothing of note.

The tepid mediocrity of Ms. Holland’s filmography from 1991 to present day may explain why I had never even heard of Mr. Jones until I was assigned to watch it and write about it.

That said, as a big fan of Europa, Europa, Vanessa Kirby and Peter Sarsgaard, as well as being a Russophile and an admirer of good journalism, I thought Mr. Jones might just hit my sweet spot and be a new cinematic feast amidst the current coronavirus movie famine.

Sadly…while there were certainly some powerful sequences, overall the lackluster direction and script left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

The biggest problem with Mr. Jones is that it is wildly uneven, with a devastatingly poor narrative structure.

The first half of the film plays out like a PBS melodrama…and not a very good one. Holland attempts to give a stylized view of the suffocating conformity of the British establishment, and then the debased debauchery of Walter Duranty’s Moscow, but is never quite able to adequately pull it off.

Another major structural issue is Holland’s choice to weave George Orwell’s writing of Animal Farm into the story. Shockingly, Orwell actually opens the movie and is used as a landmark throughout the narrative. The snippets of Orwell are at best frivolous and do nothing more than distract from the main dramatic thrust of the story.

The second half of the film is much, much better than the first. Midway through the film shifts to the devastation in Ukraine, and this is where Holland finds her footing. The scenes of starvation and desperation are exceedingly well-done and uncomfortable to watch. There is one sequence that is so brutal it left me unnerved for days. Holland’s use of the bleak and foreboding Ukrainian winter exquisitely conveys the existential depth and expanse of the ocean of suffering that was the Holomodor.

The problem though is that Holland failed to adequately build a dramatic foundation upon which to lay the tragedy of the Holomodor. I think the film actually would’ve been better served if it started with the trip to Ukraine, as that approach would have emphasized the brutal nature of the topic at hand from the get go. It also would have given context to Jones’ struggle and maybe even better fleshed out his character, which is remarkably paper-thin in the film.

Make no mistake though that Gareth Jones’ story is compelling and definitely worthy of a major movie, just that Ms. Holland is unable to tell the story with enough dramatic vigor or cinematic verve to do it justice. I couldn’t help but think that Gareth Jones life was worthy of an HBO or Netflix mini-series, as there is awful lot of meaningful story to tell.

In terms of the acting, the cast all do solid, if unspectacular, work.

James Norton brings an every man sort of energy to his Gareth Jones, which makes sense, but he definitely suffers from a charisma deficit, makes is a hindrance to his carrying the entirety of the movie. Norton never commands the screen or demands the audience’s attention, which at times undermines the film’s dramatic power.

The luminous Vanessa Kirby plays Ada Brooks, a sort of love interest to Jones. Kirby is an alluring and at times intoxicating screen presence, but is vastly misused and under utilized in Mr. Jones. Kirby is blessed with a striking screen magnetism but never gets to put meat on the bones of her character, which is a terrible waste of her prodigious talents.

Peter Sarsgaard is always an intriguing and emotionally complicated actor, and his morally compromised and diseased Walter Duranty is no exception. Sarsgaard has minimal screen time but makes the most of it as he limps and slithers through the scenery like the devil with whom Duranty made his deal.

Mr. Jones premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival back in 2019, and debuted for British audiences in February of 2020 and was scheduled to be released in the U.S. in April of 2020…but coronavirus rudely intervened.

The film was then released for purchase (but not for rent!) on streaming services in mid-June…and since I was hired to write about it, I reached into my expense account cookie jar and bought the movie for $14.99. Maybe it is my coronavirus budget talking but even though $14.99 is basically the price of a movie ticket here in the City of Angels, I found that price to be excessive.

My recommendation regarding Mr. Jones is not to purchase it…the cost is too high and it simply isn’t worth it. But I do think it might be worth watching for free on Netflix or cable when it comes out. The scenes of the Holomodor alone are worth the investment of time.

The bottom line is this…Mr. Jones is a great story (and Gareth Jones was a great man) but not a great film.

©2020

The New Movie Mr. Jones is a Timely Reminder of the Cowardice of our Current Press

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 27 seconds

In 1933, British journalist Gareth Jones risked life and limb in service to the truth, while in comparison, the journalists of today only care about access to power and towing the elite’s ideological line.

Mr. Jones, a new film by esteemed director Agnieszka Holland, tells the true story of Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist who travels to the Soviet Union in 1933 and uncovers the Holomodor, Stalin’s genocidal famine of Ukrainians.

Sadly, Mr. Jones, which boasts a fantastic cast of James Norton, Vanessa Kirby and Peter Sarsgaard, is a terrific story wrapped in a bad, dramatically unfocused and meandering film.

But thankfully, despite its cinematic unworthiness, the movie still contains important insights very relevant to our current time.

What makes Mr. Jones noteworthy is that the film’s noble protagonist is, unlike our current corrupt press corps, a dogged journalist more loyal to truth than to ideology, and more interested in maintaining his integrity than gaining access to power and wealth.

The film opens with Jones fresh off his 1933 interview with Hitler that leaves him convinced that war is ultimately inevitable. This belief gets him ridiculed for being naïve and hysterical by the stodgy and comfortable old guard of the British press.

Jones then sets his sights on the Soviet Union and tries to figure out how Stalin has been able to pull off his economic boom while the rest of the world is mired in depression, so he goes to Moscow in search of answers.

Upon arrival he finds not the worker’s paradise that fellow journalists, like the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize winning reporter in Moscow, Walter Duranty, have been deceptively portraying to the world, but instead discovers firsthand the repressive and totalitarian nature of Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Jones then follows a lead and risks his life by sneaking off a train and going to Ukraine, where he is thrust into the horrors of the Holomodor, which are brutally and effectively depicted in the film.

When Jones exposes this calamity to the western world, political expediency causes it to be met with either skepticism or indifference. Unlike other journalists of his, or our, age, Jones refuses to tell people in power what they want to hear, instead telling them the truth, and is essentially blackballed and exiled because of it.

No doubt the same would happen today to any reporter brave enough to go against the officially approved narrative.

Our current press corps is inhabited by truth-disdaining, sycophantic stenographers more akin to the villainous Walter Duranty, a propagandist for the cause who sold his journalistic soul in exchange for a decadent and depraved lifestyle, than the truth-seeking Gareth Jones.

It is ironic that journalists of yesteryear, like Duranty, were complicit in positive falsehoods about Stalin’s Soviet Union, while journalists of today are complicit in negative falsehoods about Russia.

The cavalcade of journalistic failures and fiascos directly or tangentially related to Russia in recent years include, but are not limited to, the distortion of truth about the Maidan uprising, the supposed Syrian chemical weapons attacks, the ridiculous Cuba microwave weapons story, and of course, Russiagate, the biggest journalistic fraud perpetrated upon the American public since the Iraq War. And just this week we have added to this cornucopia of corporate media crap the ‘Russians pay bounty to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan’ nonsense. All of these stories are vapid, thin, propagandistic gruel, devoid of any depth, insight or actual reporting.

One glimpse at the ever-growing list of recurring journalistic farces involving Russia and it becomes glaringly obvious that Operation Mockingbird, the Cold War CIA program that planted stories and journalists in newsrooms across the media, is alive and well in practice, if not in name.

It is readily apparent that just as Walter Duranty was getting his marching orders from Moscow, reporters of today get their marching orders from Langely.

Of course, the truth-averse, ideologically driven journalism of the corporate media isn’t restricted to just Russia stories, as evidenced by the slavish and slanted coverage of Black Lives Matter and other woke endeavors.

The thing that I find most grating about the reliably deceptive establishment media is their incessant complaining about Trump’s alleged war on the press.

These same news outlets were conspicuously silent when Obama prosecuted whistleblowers nine times, which is three times more than all of his predecessors combined.

There was also nary a word of dissension from the intrepid souls in the media when Obama’s Department of Justice and FBI spied on reporters and tried to coerce them to expose their sources.

The most glaring example of the ideological cancer in journalism is the cheering by the establishment media of the prosecution and persecution of Julian Assange, who has done more to inform the public of the truth than any corporate-controlled reporter at any news outlet in the world, and may very well die in prison for it. 

The current crop of subservient sycophants play-acting as journalists in the corporate media are an utter disgrace to their profession, and they dishonor the staggering sacrifice that people like Gareth Jones made in service to truth.

Mr. Jones is not a great movie, but it does chronicle the great struggles of a noble man. If only we had many, many more like him today, maybe truth would be revered and the powerful held accountable. 

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020