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.
