Mr. Jones (2020)
Karl Marx might have been displeased but shouldn’t have been surprised when the theories he expounded were embraced with religious fervor by people who called themselves Marxists. Rejecting God and liberalism, Marxists placed their faith in Uncle Karl’s “laws of history” and dialectical materialism. Like Christians they broke into warring sects. The Leninist sectarians who ruled the Soviet Union (and later Eastern Europe) are the subject of Mr. Jones.
The film by Poland’s Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa) draws on the real-life encounter of two antagonists, journalists Gareth Jones and Walter Duranty. Jones, a Welshman, is played with diffident charm and moral forthrightness by James Norton, who Britbox fans will recognize as the vicar of “Grantchester.” Peter Sarsgaard (Dead Man Walking) depicts the Anglo-American Duranty with chilling suavity. Jones comes to the Soviet Union believing that Lenin’s successor, Stalin, was “a man who performed miracles” but sought to verify and found something else instead. Duranty is comfortably ensconced in Moscow and, as a New York Times correspondent, feeds the outside world a sugar-sweetened diet of alternative facts.
The opening scenes may be confusing, even to someone who knows the history, but Mr. Jones settles on course once the characters are sorted. The atmosphere grows tense. A journalist friend of Jones who was onto a big story is killed outside the hotel where Jones stays, ostensibly by robbers. “Comrade, it’s a mistake!” someone pleads while being taken away from the hotel lobby. Before long, the phonograph is turned to loud during important conversations between Jones and fellow journalist Ada Brooks (Vanessa Kirby, who played Princess Margaret in “The Crown”).
For the past 40 years or so, Polish directors have excelled in meaningful and beautiful film productions. Holland is among her country’s contributors to world cinema culture and, at age 71, brings the visceral contempt of lived experience under Soviet Communism to her story. Jones is the film’s hero. Dismayed by Duranty’s decadent way of life in the ostensibly classless workers’ paradise, Jones slips away from his minders and journeys to Ukraine, where rumors of famine are resolutely denied by Soviet authorities and willing helpers such as Duranty. Holland conveys a white hell of pestilence and death in powerful scenes of hallucinatory disorientation from hunger and cold. Jones stumbles into something worse than he had imagined, a famine that gained momentum as Stalin used starvation to punish and eliminate Ukrainians who bristled under his reign. Perhaps four million died from 1932-1934 in the Holodomor, as Ukrainians call the catastrophe.
Mr. Jones is prefaced by pigs in the mud of a farm and the clack-clack typing of a writer. Soon enough the words he types become familiar as lines from Animal Farm. George Orwell reappears later in the film, doubtful of Jones’ story of the immensity of Stalin’s mendacity but, as a man concerned with truth rather than propaganda, comes around to see the Soviet Union as a monstrosity. Duranty, depicted as a faithful follower of Leninism, believing that the end goal of utopia justifies mass murder, successfully white-washed Stalin’s crimes for many years. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting. In our statue-toppling era of reevaluating the past, maybe it’s time to revoke his honor?
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