Film review

  • Mr Jones

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Agnieszka Holland (2019)

    Europa, Europa (1991) and In Darkness (2011), the two best-known films of the Polish director Agnieszka Holland, are accounts of extraordinary resistance in a world controlled by Nazi Germany.  Mr Jones, Holland’s latest true story of an unequal struggle between an unlikely hero and brutal totalitarian authorities, takes place mainly in the Soviet Union, in 1933.

    After graduating from Cambridge in 1929, a young Welshman called Gareth Jones worked as Foreign Affairs Adviser (and de facto private secretary) to Lloyd George, before becoming a journalist.  Jones was in Germany in early 1933 and, a few days after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor, was one of the first foreign pressmen to interview him.  Soon afterwards, Jones obtained permission to enter the Soviet Union.  He went there keen to secure an interview with Josef Stalin too, and to learn the secret of the USSR’s apparent economic success under Stalin’s first five-year plan.  Jones uncovered instead the horrors of the Holodomor, the man-made famine that killed millions of Ukrainians.  He managed to get back to Britain, where his reports on the famine appeared in several English and Welsh newspapers, including the Cardiff Western Mail.  Banned from re-entering the Soviet Union, Jones switched his attention to the Far East.  He spent several months in Japan and China before travelling to Mongolia.  In August 1935, The Times reported that the Chinese authorities had found Jones’s body in Manchuria.   He had been shot dead, seemingly on the eve of his thirtieth birthday.

    Agnieszka Holland’s track record may have convinced her that the material of Gareth Jones’s time in Russia and the Ukraine guaranteed a strong drama.  Mr Jones isn’t that, thanks principally to Andrea Chalupa’s shaky screenplay.  Wikipedia is only too right to term this a ‘biographical thriller’.  The characters often talk in the language of East-West espionage movies.  Holland’s direction veers between this popular terrain and some strenuously arty effects.  A prolonged shot of the protagonist (James Norton) eating a piece of bread – a fatally rare commodity in the Ukraine to which Jones has come – is slow cinema, to say the least[1].

    The film is predominantly in colour but there are stretches in black-and-white to reflect the grimmest realities of Jones’s journey (they may also be designed to connect with the photographs he took of the scenes he witnessed).  The cinematographer Thomas Naumiak creates some impressive monochrome compositions, especially of Jones as a small figure in a vast snowscape, but it’s hard to adopt this kind of visual scheme without its drawing attention to itself as a piece of technique – and Holland isn’t able to prevent that happening.  These severely aesthetic interludes sit awkwardly alongside Andrea Chalupa’s clumsy, clichéd dialogue.  A local peasant woman informs Jones that ‘millions have died’, as if the Holodomor is headline news in the Soviet papers.  When the story actually appears in the British press, a newsboy is heard calling, ‘Read all about it – Gareth Jones reports!’  Jones seems to have become an instant household name.

    Holland and Chalupa use as a narrative framing device sequences of George Orwell (Joseph Mawle) at his typewriter, writing Animal Farm.  The opening sentence of Orwell’s novella is, ‘Mr Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the popholes’.  In the scheme of Orwell’s political allegory, the farmer is generally supposed to be Tsar Nicholas II but there’s a theory that he was named for Gareth Jones.  The latter’s reports on the Ukraine famine were received sceptically by much of the British left-wing intelligentsia but Orwell was an exception; Animal Farm, first published in 1945, includes a chapter that clearly refers to the Ukraine famine of a decade before.  Mr Jones expands these details into the framing sequences and a scene late on where Jones and Orwell actually meet.  But this is too cursory to bring their imagined relationship to life.

    Except for her countryman Krzysztof Pieczyński (as the Bolshevik politician Maxim Litvinov), Holland has cast Anglophone actors in the main roles.  Vanessa Kirby seems a bit generic in her role as a femme fatale-ish but principled journalist working in Moscow but Peter Sarsgaard is ingeniously sinister as her illustrious, decidedly unprincipled boss, the Pulitzer Prize-winning newsman Walter Duranty.  Kenneth Cranham makes a brief, entertaining appearance as Lloyd George. It’s frustrating that Joseph Mawle, not seen enough lately, hasn’t more to do as Orwell.

    There’s been speculation that James Norton could be the next James Bond.  Without begrudging him a new level of fame and fortune, I hope the speculation’s wrong and that Norton can carry on with proper acting.   His wonderful portrait of Stephen Ward in The Trial of Christine Keeler was his best work yet.  Agnieszka Holland’s title character is a somewhat unworldly young man whose probing intelligence and tenacity propel him into an improbably perilous ordeal.  James Norton tries valiantly to individualise him – to convey just how remarkable his story was.  Gareth Jones was up against it, to put mildly, in expressing the truth of the Holodomor.  Norton is fighting the de-personalising script and confusing direction of Mr Jones every step of the way.

    21 March 2020

    [1] Afternote:  The film’s running time, according to the Curzon website and IMDb, is 141 minutes.   Even though it sometimes drags, I felt sure Mr Jones was over in less than that when I watched it on Curzon Home Cinema.  This seems to be right.  According to Philip Kemp’s Sight & Sound (March 2020) review, the running time has been trimmed to 118 minutes.

  • Misbehaviour

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Philippa Lowthorpe (2020)

    This is a year like no other but there was just time, before the lights went down in cinemas in a new way, for a familiar stage of the British film-going year to get started.  As soon as the awards season is over, a clutch of home-grown pictures dominates the trailers and new releases.  At least one of them will be hailed somewhere in the press as ‘the feel-good film of the year’, even though the year is only a few weeks old.  In 2020, it’s Peter Cattaneo’s Military Wives.  I couldn’t face Kristin Scott Thomas doing heartwarming-but-humorous sisterhood – or, for that matter, Steve Coogan skewering a Philip Green-inspired billionaire in Michael Winterbottom’s Greed.  I bought a ticket for Misbehaviour instead.  It looked naff from the trailer but at least Philippa Lowthorpe had an interesting subject – how, in 1970, the Miss World contest was politicised as never before.

    As the screenwriter of Their Finest (the feel-good film of the year in April 2017), Gaby Chiappe has form in the British post-awards fare department.  She has co-written Misbehaviour with Rebecca Frayn.  The narrative involves four main groups or couples:  Eric Morley, founder of the Miss World pageant and, with his wife Julia, the competition’s chief organiser; Bob Hope, whom the Morleys persuade to do a guest compere spot on the show, and his wife Dolores; a few key contestants; and the motley crew of proto-feminists whose demonstration will eventually hijack Hope’s performance and steal the Miss World show.   One of the many strong points of the recent TV mini-series The Trial of Christine Keeler, written by Amanda Coe, was how it described an apparently disparate collection of individuals colliding to produce the Profumo affair:  the director Andrea Harkin[1] made their convergence entertainingly inexorable.  Something similar might have happened in Misbehaviour, at least in its juxtaposition of the feminists, who aren’t planning from the outset to disrupt proceedings, and the other characters.  Until they clash at the supposed climax, the various contributors take repeated turns as the focus of attention.  But there’s no rhythm or momentum in the storytelling.

    BBC Films were among the production companies behind Misbehaviour.  To coincide with its release, the BBC broadcast a documentary – Miss World 1970:  Beauty Queens and Bedlam, directed by Hannah Berryman – about the same events and personnel.  The documentary form naturally enables this one-hour film to be more straightforwardly informative than Lowthorpe’s; Berryman’s effort is more insightful and funnier too.  It presents the political issues clearly and captures the bizarre comedy aspect of what happened.  The documentary also has some inbuilt advantages, not least the retrospective interviews with the main dramatis personae, most of them now in their seventies.   They include the demonstrators Sue Finch, Jo Robinson and Sarah Wilson, the contest winner Jennifer Hosten (Miss Grenada), runner-up Pearl Janssen (Miss Africa South) and bookies’ favourite Maj Christel Johansson (Miss Sweden), who ended up fourth.  Footage from the BBC’s live broadcast of the contest from the Royal Albert Hall[2], of which there’s plenty, suggests that Bob Hope’s worst remarks were prompted by lack of audience laughter at his early jokes.  He pushed harder and more offensively for a reaction, and got it in the form of flour bombs and water pistols.

    The usual Miss World compere at the time was Michael Aspel, who shared the stage with Hope in 1970 and whose recollections in Beauty Queens and Bedlam are consistently interesting.  Now retired (and a well-preserved eighty-seven), Aspel was a versatile and highly professional broadcaster:  he’s well aware that he got the Miss World job because the BBC felt his cachet as a newsreader would give proceedings a patina of respectability.  He has a likeable mixture of candour and ruefulness in talking to Berryman.  ‘People love to look at girls,’ he says matter-of-factly, then uncomfortably recalls the cameras moving up and down the contestants’ bodies.  Whereas Berryman includes visual proof of this, Philippa Lowthorpe is in a bind with it.  She wants to condemn the ‘cattle market’ appraisal of the girls but she can’t replicate the camera movement except via a female gaze (even if her DP is a man, Zac Nicholson).  The result is camerawork that seems oddly prudish.

    Although the 1970 television broadcast looks technically quite primitive now, Michael Aspel isn’t the only one of Hannah Berryman’s talking heads to make clear the importance of Miss World in the annual TV calendar of the era.  Philippa Lowthorpe is so intent on conveying the squalid ethos of beauty pageants that she makes the show too downmarket.  There’s not enough distinction between the grey, windswept seaside resort setting of the British eliminator and the main event in London – and that’s in spite of the national contest itself looking too bargain-basement (it’s reminiscent of the bathing beauty competition in The Entertainer).  Even fifty years ago, Eric Morley was widely regarded (and by plenty of Miss World viewers) as sleazy but he turned the Mecca organisation into a major entertainment organisation and his cheque-book wasn’t small.  It doesn’t seem to occur to Lowthorpe that the lavish surface of the contest might have been used to strengthen her film’s censure of what Miss World represented.

    The theatrical release poster shows the main characters, several of them wearing exaggerated facial expressions.  This seems to promise broad comedy but the film, although it includes plenty of coarse acting, doesn’t turn out that way, for two reasons.  Philippa Lowthorpe’s lack of comic touch is reinforced by her evident conviction that the story she’s telling is no laughing matter.  The legends on the screen at the end conclude with ‘Attempts to bring down the patriarchy remain ongoing’.  It would be nice to think this inelegant wording was itself a joke – a signal of humorous self-awareness – but it would also be wishful thinking.  Misbehaviour (the faintly punning title is one of the better things about it) seems less feminist than Manichaean about the sexes:  women are good and men are bad.

    Except for the xenophobic little cartoon of Miss USA (Suki Waterhouse), all the female characters are treated kindly.  They don’t need to be feminists – like educated, middle-class Sally Alexander (Keira Knightley) and mouthy, blunt northerner Jo Robinson (Jessie Buckley), her polar opposite in the group.  You’re encouraged to feel sympathy for Dolores Hope (Lesley Manville), acutely aware that the last time Bob appeared on Miss World he followed it up by having a fling with the winner.  You’re sorry even for Julia Morley (Keeley Hawes), whose ladylike fragrance stresses her bad luck to be saddled with such a grubby husband (Rhys Ifans).  The male characters are rubbished in a lazily derisive way:  they have to be, more than pernicious, incompetent.  Dolores Hope runs rings round the clumsy philanderer she stays loyal to.  Eric Morley is portrayed as a martinet manqué – someone who couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery.  It hardly seems worth the trouble of excoriating patriarchy as ineffectual as this.

    In an early scene, Sally Alexander goes for a university admission interview, in the history department of UCL[3].  Sitting waiting to be called in, Sally, who’s in her mid-twenties, is sandwiched between school-uniformed teenage boys and girls.  The improbably numerous panel of six interviewers are all men.  As Sally takes a seat and before she’s said a word, one of the panel passes his neighbour a note, giving Sally a score of seven out of ten.  The other man frowns humorously, changes the seven to a nine, and passes the note back.  Honestly, it’s like these academics are judging a beauty contest!    The interview questions that follow characterise the panel as either stuffy or hostile – to a man.  Sally leaves in high dudgeon.  A couple of scenes later, she learns that UCL has offered her a place.  How come?

    Lowthorpe isn’t interested in the answer to that sort of question.  She just wants to take a dim view of the UCL panel before moving to the next thing on her checklist-cum-hit-list.  Just as Misbehaviour’s Eric Morley is a hectic, hopeless chancer, so Bob Hope (Greg Kinnear) comes across as a showbiz has-been with no better offers coming his way than the one he gets from Morley.  The most striking male characterisation is of Sally Alexander’s domestic partner Gareth Stedman-Jones (John Heffernan).  Along with Sally’s mother Evelyn (Phyllis Logan), Gareth looks after their home and Sally’s young daughter from her short-lived marriage[4].  When she worriedly warns her daughter that assigning a homebody role to a man risks emasculating him, Evelyn Alexander is illustrating the pitiable benightedness of her generation.   She’s right, though:  Gareth, according to the film, is just a wimp.  Misbehaviour makes fun of the only man in evidence whose understanding of gender roles is relatively enlightened.

    The racial politics of the story aren’t susceptible to the same simplistic treatment as the sexual politics so it’s no wonder race themes have a relatively secondary role in the film.  Of course Lowthorpe and the screenwriters stress that Jennifer Hosten (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) was the first black winner of the contest but her win in 1970 really was overshadowed by two factors, minor and major.  The judging panel included Eric Gairy, the Premier of Grenada.  The film shows Gairy[5]  recommending himself to Julia Morley but omits mention of the post-contest mutterings that Jennifer Hosten got a prejudiced helping hand from the judges.  (Beauty Queens and Bedlam doesn’t ignore this:  there’s an interview clip in which Gairy calmly points out to Martin Bell that, when Miss United Kingdom won a few years previously, there were four British judges on the panel.)  More important, the runner-up to Hosten was another black contestant.  The presence in the competition, for the first time, of a black South African alongside the country’s white representative, was an egregious attempt, urged upon the relevant South African authorities by Eric Morley, to prevent Miss World being stymied by anti-apartheid activists, who’d recently done so well to derail British sporting tours by white-only South African teams.

    Miss World 1970 would have been a more potent political parable if Pearl Janssen, rather than Jennifer Hosten, had won but this isn’t why Misbehaviour downplays the racial dimension.  (It just about ignores the irony of both South African entrants reaching the final seven and of Pearl Janssen beating the white Miss South Africa (Emma Corrin), who finished fifth.)  The film-makers feel morally obliged to present the black contestants’ one-two as better than nothing but this actually gets in the way of their main concern.  Since the competition is degrading to women, it would have made life easier for Misbehaviour if the result had also confirmed a pro-white bias, so as to demonise the contest unequivocally.  Another black contestant says at one point, ‘we’re black – we’re not going to be Miss World’.  It’s almost a letdown when one of them is.

    Misbehaviour, needless to say, doesn’t make clear that, although no black woman had previously won Miss World, there had been non-white winners – Carole Crawford (Miss Jamaica), who was of mixed race, in 1963; Reita Faria (Miss India) in 1966.  Faria was a medical student at the time and, after her year’s ‘reign’ as Miss World, went on to qualify as a physician.  The where-are-they-now information on the screen at the end of Misbehaviour summarises Sally Alexander’s successful academic career (she’s now Professor Emerita of History at Goldsmiths) and notes Jennifer Hosten’s subsequent educational achievements, as well as her term as Grenadian High Commissioner to Canada.  If Wikipedia is to be believed, Hosten, the first Grenadian to compete in Miss World, was in 2006 ‘appointed the National Director of the Miss Grenada World Contest.  The event … chose only the third Grenadian woman in history to compete at the Miss World finals’.   That doesn’t get mentioned in the closing legends.

    Beauty Queens and Bedlam likewise says nothing about Carole Crawford or Reita Faria but it does more than Misbehaviour to address the issue of the Miss World girls being willing or eager participants, and how much that was dictated by socio-economic circumstances in their native country.  Rather than give the contestants the opportunity to voice their thoughts, Philippa Lowthorpe prefers to let them gaze inscrutably at the camera – until, that is, a daft powder-room meeting between Jennifer Hosten and Sally Alexander, a few minutes after the former has been crowned and while the latter is trying to escape pursuing police officers.  Hosten sharply tells Alexander that, ‘I look forward to having your choices in life’.  Another item on the checklist ticked off though little to suggest the remark gives Sally Alexander pause – or Keira Knightley’s interpretation of her, at any rate.

    In a promotional video for Misbehaviour available on the Independent website, Jessie Buckley informs us that ‘In the 1970s, women weren’t allowed to dream beyond making a cupcake’ – a thick remark that foretells Buckley’s disappointing, nuance-free playing of Jo Robinson.  As Eric Morley, Rhys Ifans sounds like Mike Yarwood doing Bruce Forsyth.  Ifans has crude energy to burn – a pity he couldn’t have loaned some to Greg Kinnear, a tepid Bob Hope, imprisoned in prosthetic make-up.  Gugu Mbatha-Raw is OK in her underwritten role.  It’s kind of apt that hard-to-dislike Keeley Hawes was cast as Julia Morley, whose name still features on a hugely popular BBC fixture.  Her late husband also introduced Come Dancing to the world so Julia gets a credit on the screen at the end of every Strictly show.

    It goes almost without saying that the most incisive (and enjoyable) performance comes from Lesley Manville.   Alexa Davies and Lily Newmark have only minor roles within the feminist collective but these two good young actresses (Davies was one of the few assets of the seriously overlong White House Farm on ITV recently) are admirably natural beside the leading lights of Keira Knightley and Jessie Buckley.  Misbehaviour has no visual style.  In Beauty Queens and Bedlam, Jo Robinson recalls the flour bombs exploding from on high and, as it descended in the Albert Hall lights, looking ‘like snowflakes’.  Hannah Berryman uses animation to create this effect.  It’s a more striking image than any in Philippa Lowthorpe’s feeble film.

    17 March 2020

    [1] Harkin directed the first four of the six episodes, Leanne Welham the last two.

    [2] For reasons unclear, the competition venue in Misbehaviour is the fictional ‘Princess Theatre’.

    [3] Or what is now UCL:  in 1970, its formal name was University of London, University College.

    [4] To the actor John Thaw:  the child in the film (played by Maya Kelly) grew up to be Abigail Thaw, nowadays a regular in Endeavour.

    [5] The actor is uncredited on IMDb.

     

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