Welsh journalist Gareth Jones risks his life to expose the truth about the devastating famine in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s.
Welsh journalist Gareth Jones risks his life to expose the truth about the devastating famine in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. When you think of genocide, the Holocaust during World War II is usually what pops into mind. The Rwandan or Armenian Genocides may also come to mind. A story that isn't so well known is that of Holodomor, the man-made famine of Ukraine. Mr. Jones is, as such, based on a true story.
What is unfortunately very clear is that our main character lacks any charisma. Gareth Morgan is a man that does not partake in recreational drugs, alcohol, or love interests, instead, only having an interest in journalistic integrity and finding out the truth at any cost. The final aspect of his personality should be what drives the script, but much of the time is improperly spent proving how little people care about his concerns on the Soviet Union or Hitler, and on how much of a buzzkill Mr Jones is. Perhaps the real-life Gareth Jones was such a bland individual, but there were many more exciting elements of the story that they could have pulled focus towards.
It is the narrative structure of Mr. Jones that really holds it back; spending the entire first act setting up a story that could have been done in a couple of minutes, rushing through the more engaging Ukranian arc in the second act, ending with a third act meanders in a disjointed and pace-less mess. Despite the significant amount of time delegated to set up the background to the story, there is very little character development, beyond again and again re-establishing that Mr Jones has the most integrity of all the characters, and it proves to be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
Mr Jones (portrayed by James Norton) ends up an uninteresting, and unrelatable character. A character with no flaws, who operates in a world of black and white. This means he has no elements of his character to overcome and develop, which create no personal stakes. It is because of this that Mr Jones becomes difficult to empathise with. His character is cold, clinical, and no matter what horrors and travesties Mr Jones comes across, he is merely a part-time spectator.
Vanessa Kirby is just as forgettable, but on the other side of the coin, Peter Sarsgaard does a phenomenal job as the greasy Pulitzer prize-winner Walter Duranty. Oozing with confidence, there is no question that he is at home in the Moscow environment. There is a great subtlety to his mannerisms that leave you unsure of how much his loyalties have been corrupted by the life of abject opulence he lives.
The visual elements are the true strength of the film. The contrast between the environments of Moscow and Ukraine is immense. Moscow is alive with people, lush with a warm colour palette of dark greens, yellows, and browns. The Ukraine environments, on the other hand, are nearly devoid of colour, desaturated, with blues and blacks splattered across a crisp, white canvas. people are fewer, as are buildings and vehicles. The colour palette and set design form a desolate and bitterly cold atmosphere. The desaturation allows emphasis to be placed on items through the use of colour, highlighting how out of place and foreign food has become.
Mr. Jones does well to show to depths of the famine; starvation, abandonment, death, and cannibalism. But this section of the film is largely rushed through, and able to walk away at any moment, Mr Jones has shown no emotional connection to any of it; by extension, neither does the audience. The cinematography further aggravates the most important act of the film by the amount of handheld shaky-cam and close-up shots employed. While reasonable in short bursts, the frequent use of the camera style prevents the audience from having any sense of geography. We simply see a sad thing and then move on to another. Clinical, and unengaging.
This is an important story, and one has to wonder about which of the themes director Agnieszka Holland is trying to convey. The film has three potential primary messages; Communist and Socialist regimes lead to overwhelming death and famine, Democratic Capitalists will happily ignore human rights issues to ensure trade continues, and the integrity of the media has been corrupted for a long time. With US election campaigns in full swing and Bernie Sanders rising in popularity with his Socialist policies, is this meant to be a warning of sorts against turning your back on Democracy? Is it meant to warn about the proliferation of lies in the media? There is no clear direction to the bias of the film's narrative.
Going as far as to include a recurring subplot around George Orwell writing Animal Farm throughout the film (which is more than a little on the nose), Mr. Jones may simply be an attack on both political systems that allowed a man-made famine to let an estimated 7 million Ukrainians die. With an uncertain narrative direction and a protagonist that failed to hook in the audience, Mr. Jones fails to take advantage of the powerful story it is trying to communicate. It does, however, pique curiosity about Holodomor, making one want to learn more. Perhaps that is all that Mr. Jones wants of us.
Mr Jones is in theatres from February 27, 2020