Review by Doug Gibson
I've watched the film "Mr. Jones" several times the past few days. Each viewing is a stronger punch in the gut. This is the most important film of the year, and even if there wasn't a pandemic it would likely have a limited release, with its commercial life relegated to streaming.
I watched it with my son, 15, yesterday. He's readying for 10th grade; an intelligent 4.0 student as well as an accomplished amateur boxer. His reaction to the film -- succinct and appropriate: Why haven't we learned about this in school?
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"Mr. Jones" is a true story, albeit with composite characters and some non-relevant historical license (George Orwell (Joseph Mawle) floats through the story, quoting "Animal Farm" and sharing two apocryphal scenes with the main character.)
It's the story of Gareth Jones, (James Norton) a young Welsh policy wonk in the early 1930s who had a passion for journalism. Through dogged persistence, also called shoe-leather journalism, he once snagged an off-the-cuff interview with Adolf Hitler.
The film opens with Jones, an adviser to a top British government official, warning his boss and others about the danger Hitler poses. His listeners respond with condescending laughter. Afterward, Jones is let go by his employer; not for his advice. His employer is genuinely fond and appreciative of Jones. It's the global depression; he can't be fit in the budget.
Jones has been researching Stalin and his economic policies in Russia. He can't understand how Stalin has so much money. The numbers don't add up. With a letter of recommendation from his boss, and some help from a journalist in Russia, Paul Kleb (1), he secures a press credential to visit Russia. His goal, greeted often with amusement, is to interview Stalin.
He is advised to contact a journalist for the New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize winner named Walter Duranty (Peter Sarsgaard). Duranty, the media star there, is known as the man with Stalin's ear. In Moscow, Jones is assigned two days (he expected a week) in a luxury hotel. He finds out journalists are not allowed to leave Moscow. He learns Kleb, who had told him on the phone he was working on a big story on the Ukraine before the line went bad -- was murdered on the same day.
Duranty is cordial but patronizing with Jones, inviting him to a party with other journalists, in Duranty's suite at the same hotel. It's a sex party, and Jones declines entreaties for sex with women, drug use, and sex with men. A memorable line comes from an intoxicated journalist telling a bewildered Jones to associate the party with Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death," at least until that book is banned, he adds.
I've hewed tightly to the plot to set the film's scenario, but I'll move faster now. Jones develops a friendship with an employee of Duranty's, a journalist named Ada (Vanessa Kirby). She provides Kleb's notes on Ukraine, entrusted with her, to Jones. Using his association with his prominent former employer in Britain, Jones manages to finagle, from an arrogant Soviet official, a government-approved trip to the Ukraine area to see their engineering success. Once on the luxury train, Jones easily eludes his alcoholic minder and transfers himself to a cargo boxcar. Inside, he sees travelers herded like cattle, freezing as the train moves forward.
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The second half of the film provides historical gut punch after gut punch. The movie at times seems to be a stream of consciousness, the viewer transported behind Jones' eyes, as he plays witness to an evil far greater than the 20-something journalist dreamed possible. It's also an evil hidden from the world, and enabled by a media unwilling to confront it.
In the boxcar, every eye turns to Jones as he eats an orange. When he tosses the peeling to the ground, more than several try to get a bite at it. At one point Jones offers money to buy a winter coat from a traveler. The seller has no interest in money, but he'll trade for a loaf of black bread. When he arrives in Ukraine, Jones quickly learns the answer to his questions. Stalin's government is transporting all the grain harvested to Moscow. Menacing soldiers push people around, ignoring dead bodies in the streets. People are starving to death.
Jones narrowly escapes capture after disembarking from the train. A starving old man, noticing his camera, accuses him of being a spy to a soldier. After escaping the city, we spend several scenes of Jones wandering through deserted, frozen country, with long empty fields dotted with mostly silent villages. The white cinematography is superb, and director Agnieszka Holland frames the land so perfectly; so beautiful but so desolate, a gorgeous hell of death and suffering.
It is very, very hard to endure some of the ensuing scenes. I'll mention a couple because this is history and no one should complain about "spoilers." The scene that hit me the hardest was Jones encountering a cart on its way, collecting the dead along the road. A toddler, little more than an infant, is crying loudly next to his dead mother. The cart's driver tosses the mother in the cart, and without a thought, tosses the crying toddler, alive, into the cart with the dead bodies.
Another scene involves Jones entering a house where three children live. They are cooking meat. During dinner Jones inquires, to the oldest child, who provided the meat. She gives the name of her brother. Is he a hunter, Jones asks. No one at the table responds. Jones gets up and walks around the house. At an open back door, he sees a corpse preserved in the snow, a portion of meat from his leg cut out.
Later, at a bread line, a woman tells Jones that millions have died. He is then captured and returned to Moscow. He is released after being forced to say that the Ukraine has no problems and the people are happy. Before Jones is allowed to go home, six British engineers are arrested as "spies."
Duranty tells Jones that he got him released. An angry Jones confronts the corrupt journalist, offering him a piece of bark --- the food staple of Ukranians -- and tells him to place it next to his Pulitzer. Duranty tells Jones it's a pity, he would have made a good journalist.
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The final third of the film covers Jones' return to Britain and his attempts to tell about the forced famine, only to be hit with a continued barrage of fake news. A successful attack on his credibility is led by the Pulitzer-winner Duranty. Seventeen years ago, Sarsgaard effectively played an ethical journalist in the film, "Shattered Glass,"' about the New Republic plagiarism scandal. But the now-older actor is even better as the hobbling, slithering esteemed liar Duranty, happy to perpetuate fake news that feeds a famine. As National Review's Kyle Smith points out in his review (linked in this paragraph) Duranty was not a stereotypical hack or useful idiot, he was "a deeply evil man."
Even Jones' ex-employer demands he retract his claims. He won't. But he enters a journalistic and cultural purgatory that, frankly, is not uncommon in history. His principles insist he do what is right, rather than what is easy (apologies to "Albus Dumbledore").
Norton's Jones is a contrast. A deferential, glasses-wearing, mild young man with resolve of steel and a moral code that can withstand the taunts of the 1930s' version of Twitter and cancel culture. He doesn't take his blows without showing injury. Gordon's Jones cries as he is mocked.
He endures, and he finds an opportunity to get the truth about Ukraine in print, boldly barging into publisher William F. Hearst's vacation home and pitching his story. Hearst accepts it, seeming to take pleasure at taking on Duranty and the Times.
The movie ends with Jones' reports in the press and being widely discussed. Hearst ran a conservative empire so, like today, I'm sure Jones' reports were tagged as "conservative propaganda" by Duranty and others. But the facts got out; and that is what is important, as Jones' notes to a skeptical Ada early in the film.
While the film is about Stalin's Holodomor (Holocaust) it is also about fake news, and there are parallels to today, although of course not to the extent of covering up an event that killed millions. The past four years a fake Russian conspiracy charge against the current President, and many others, has been propagated, debunked, and nevertheless still propagated by both politicos and prominent media. One can read definitive accounts noting this hoax by journalists from the right and the left. History perhaps, doesn't change as much as we think.
Back to my son's questions: Why don't I know of Gareth Jones? Why does Walter Duranty still have a Pulitzer? There's a simple answer. Truth and courage does not always provide a great reputation among the world.
Jones was murdered about a year later in Mongolia while reporting. According to the film, his guide was associated with the Russian secret police. Duranty lived a cosseted, comfortable life, dying in Florida at the age of 73.
(1) Kleb, a composite character, is obviously in name an homage to Paul Klebnikov, a journalist for Forbes murdered in Russia in 2004.
