Mark Reviews Movies: MR. JONES (2020)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 18, 2020

You can convince someone that an idea is incorrect. You might even be able to convince somebody that an ideology is wrong. As for a person's concept of an ideal, though, that's almost impossible to break. An ideal is not just a single idea, and it expands beyond ideology. It is a belief that there is only one way for things to be correct and right in a given situation, for a country, or for the entire world. Everything else, then, must be wrong.

Mr. Jones, an account of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones' uncovering of the man-made famine throughout the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, touches upon this notion, in addition to a few other things. The bulk of the movie presents a mystery and the horrific answer to it, and by the time Andrea Chalupa's screenplay gets around to providing a thesis for this story, we mostly have become numbed by the onslaught of horror and despair on display.

To be fair, Chalupa does set up the core idea—that some folks will deny and lie about and obscure the truth that's right in front of them in order to protect some grand ideal—as the mystery is established. The idea is that communism—and, more specifically, the brand of it as promised by the Russian Revolution and, even more specifically, ostensibly fulfilled under the reign of Joseph Stalin—will bring about a paradise for any country that institutes the ideology.

Some are willing to kill for it, either by direct or indirect means. Most are willing to lie for it. The telling thing is that no one with any real political power in Stalin's Soviet Union is willing to die for it. The system has given them too much influence and made them too comfortable for such a thought to cross the mind.

We're reminded of the basics of this history by way of the movie's framing device, which has George Orwell, as played by Joseph Mawle, writing and narrating passages from Animal Farm. The narrative device also feels like an easy way for Chalupa to provide a thematic foundation for this story from a position of authority. One supposes that if a writer is going to crib a thesis from someone, it may as well be from one of the best.

The actual story, set in 1933, follows Gareth (James Norton), currently serving as an advisor for David Lloyd George (Kenneth Cranham), the former prime minister of the United Kingdom. As a journalist covering the rise of the Nazis, Gareth recently was on an airplane with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, and he has become convinced, despite the disbelieving chuckles of his colleagues, that the world is the precipice of another war.

There's the question of the Soviet Union. Gareth is skeptical about how the Soviet government has found the money to accomplish its recent industrial upturn. Before Gareth heads to Moscow, a journalist friend, reporting from that capital city, suggests his colleague should look into Ukraine.

The first act here provides a lengthy buildup to what Gareth discovers in Ukraine. The journalist friend is killed in a suspicious mugging. Walter Duranty (Peter Sarsgaard), the New York Times' man in Moscow, argues that everything about the Soviets' industrial boom is on the level and invites Gareth to a lavish party, with a lot of women and booze and drugs, in his fancy lodgings. Duranty's right-hand reporter Ada Brooks (Vanessa Kirby) has family in Berlin, knows what's to come, and thinks Stalin's country, not only could defeat Hitler, but also could be the ideological salvation for the world.

After all of this setup on the part of Chalupa, the movie shifts in wholly noticeable and notable ways. It's almost as if director Agnieszka Holland, freed from the requirements of dialogue and political observations and thematic concerns, takes over entirely.

Gareth travels to Ukraine and is beset by utter, incalculable anguish and despair. Any concept of a plot disappears, as Holland shows us scenes—sometimes lengthy and captured in a single shot—of starving peasants as they stare at Gareth peeling an orange on a train, of our protagonist being called a spy after asking a single question and being chased through a forest, of a crying child joining the body of his dead mother in being tossed into a cart filled with corpses, of a line for food rations erupting into unstopped violence, and of a family of children eating meat and noting that it was provided by their absent older brother.

The undeniable impact of this section comes, not only from the content, but also from how formally distinct it is from the movie's surrounding sections. There is, perhaps, nowhere for this story to go and no matter that seems nearly as significant after what we witness. Indeed, the rest of the story, as Gareth returns home to tell this story, feels more perfunctory than useful. The truth is revealed to the world, comes to be denied by Duranty, serves as an inspiration for Orwell, and falls into relative obscurity as Hitler's aims become apparent to more people.

It seems odd to say that a single portion of a movie is too strong for the good of the whole. Such, though, is the case with Mr. Jones, in which crushing horror overshadows every other concern.

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