Mr. Jones

UK Release Date. 7 February 2020
Certification. 15
Running Time. 2 hours 21 mins
Director. Agnieszka Holland
Cast. Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Mawle, James Norton, Peter Sarsgaard.
Rating. 46%

Review.

Mr. Jones is the true story of the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones (James Norton), who travelled to the Soviet Union in the hope of securing an interview with Joseph Stalin but ended up exposing a horrific government-engineered food shortage, the so-called Holodomor. From the outset, director Agnieszka Holland is burdened with too many seemingly important, competing stories and hamstrung by a disjointed script from first-time screenwriter, Andrea Chalupa. Is the story,

• Jones documenting the rise of Adolf Hitler while fellow journalists in Great Britain turn a blind eye?
• Jones' discovery of the Holodomor, a famine that starved millions in the Ukraine while grain was sold abroad to swell the Soviet coffers?
• Or is it how these events inspired George Orwell to write 1945's Animal Farm, an allegorical fable that satirised the events of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent toxic communist ideology imposed on the people by Stalin?

In truth, it's all three, but the end result is a garbled, fragmented and frustrating offering. One that fails to bring its important subject matter to life. 

Mr. Jones is part docudrama, part arthouse cinema aesthetic. Most notably in an almost wordless section in the Ukraine where Holland and her cinematographer (Tomasz Naumiuk) present a harrowing vision of genocide against the striking imagery and monochrome beauty of snow and skeletal trees.

Ultimately, Mr. Jones is an unsentimental lesser-known slice of history, a serious endeavour that never quite reaches the heights of Holland's best work, most notably Europa Europa and In Darkness.