David Stratton reviews: Agnieszka Holland’s Mr Jones

Despite an awkward structure director Agnieszka Holland’s Mr Jones is still a powerful story.

James Norton in Mr Jones.

The story of the devastating Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, a tragedy for which Stalin’s policies have been blamed, has rarely been told on the screen. All credit, then, to Polish director Agnieszka Holland, who started her film career in the 1970s, when Poland was still under Communist rule, and who has good reason to want to remind the world of the excesses of which the Soviet Union was capable.

Mr Jones, her story of the Ukraine famine, scripted by Andrea Chalupa, centres on the real-life character of Gareth Jones (James Norton), a Welsh journalist, and sometime adviser to prime minister Lloyd George (Kenneth Cranham). In 1933, Jones — then aged 27 — received a call from a friend, Paul Kleb (Marcin Czarnik), in Moscow that intrigued him to the point that he dropped everything and used his connections to gain access to the Soviet capital. By the time he arrives, Kleb is already dead, apparently murdered; but Jones makes contact with New York Times bureau chief Walter Duranty (Peter Sarsgaard), who seems to have unlimited access to the Soviet leaders and whose dispatches to his newspaper are consistently upbeat and positive regarding Stalin’s achievements. The rather straitlaced Jones is shocked to witness the dissolute lifestyle enjoyed by Duranty and other Western journalists, a lifestyle apparently condoned and even encouraged by the Soviet authorities.

It is Kleb’s lover, Ada Brooks (Vanessa Kirby), who alerts Jones to what is happening in Ukraine. Evading his Communist minders, Jones travels west at great personal risk — the land is in the grip of winter — and witnesses first-hand the horrors of the famine, which has been caused by Stalin’s decision to confiscate all the grain harvested in the Republic and use the money raised from its sale to fund both modernisation of the backward country and also to finance the arms industry in preparation for the expected conflict with Hitler. Jones sees bodies, some still alive, thrown on to carts for burial, and meets a family reduced to cannibalism to survive.

He returns to London with a story no one wants to print; Duranty’s “fake news” is the accepted “truth” from Russia in the West. But George Orwell (Joseph Mawle) believes him — and writes Animal Farm in response — and Jones eventually succeeds in selling his story to William Randolph Hearst (Matthew Marsh).

Peter Sarsgaard in Mr Jones.

It’s a powerful story, but Holland doesn’t quite make the most of it. The structure is awkward at times, and scenes with Orwell working on his book could have been handled better. When the film premiered in competition at the Berlin Film Festival last year it was about 20 minutes longer than the version being cautiously released in a few Australian cinemas; it may well have been improved by this re-editing, but it might also have been made a little more confusing.

Confused, too, is Tomasz Naumiuk’s photography. At times, as in the almost monochrome Ukraine scenes, it’s starkly beautiful, but sudden, unwarranted bursts of queasy-cam are intrusive.

Norton is a doggedly believable Jones and Sarsgaard’s Duranty is suitably slippery and devious. At a time when few Western journalists were allowed to operate in Russia, Duranty’s role as a Stalin apologist and supplier of dishonestly upbeat stories to the outside world seems particularly reprehensible. Fake news, of course, is with us still.

Mr Jones (Obywatel Jones) (MA15+)
Very limited release

★★★½

 

-

Frustrating lack of context spoils breathtaking film

A scene from Monos, directed by Alejandro Landes.

A favourite on the film festival circuit last year, Monos is a Colombian production about child soldiers. The opening images, which are spectacularly beautiful, introduce a gang of young, armed militants — of both sexes — against a truly spectacular and remote mountain backdrop.

The children have names — Rambo, Wolf, Smurf, Dog, Swede, Lady, Boom Boom, Bigfoot — and they are, we learn, serving something known as The Organisation. They are guarding a prisoner, an American woman they call Doctor (Julianne Nicholson). Their contact with the outside world is Messenger (Wilson Salazar), who brings them a radio, with which to contact base, and a cow to provide a source of milk. Their leader is Wolf (Julian Giraldo), but the youngsters he commands are an unruly lot. When Dog (Paul Cubides) goes on a shooting rampage during which he accidentally kills the cow, Wolf is disgraced and Bigfoot (Moises Arias) replaces him as leader. Then Doctor escapes and flees into the jungle pursued by the young warriors and the action shifts from the mountains. The climax unfolds on a fast-flowing river.

The real star of Monos has to be Jasper Wolf, who is responsible for the exceptionally fine cinematography. Yet despite its considerable attributes, many will find the film disappointing. The director and co-writer, Alejandro Landes, stubbornly, almost wilfully, refuses to give the audience any hint as to context. We don’t know where this story is taking place, and we don’t know when — presumably the present, but it’s not clear. Little or no attempt is made to differentiate the young soldiers — in fact, for a while it’s difficult to determine which are the boys and which are the girls. Who are these kids? Where are they from, how did they find themselves in this situation? None of these (reasonable) questions is answered. For some viewers that might not matter; it might be enough to experience a genuinely exotic drama that unfolds amid such savage scenery. You shouldn’t expect, perhaps, to take it all too literally.

But, as much as I admired elements of the film, I found the reluctance of the director to explain anything increasingly annoying. The dramatic incidents are arbitrary and not very convincing. It all looks wonderful, but I wanted more than beautiful imagery. What exactly is The Organisation? How does the chain of command work? Has Doctor been kidnapped to be ransomed?

There are allusions to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies — including one direct reference — but that fine novel, and Peter Brook’s 1962 screen adaptation, though also elliptical, provided far more satisfying drama than Landes’s somewhat frustrating epic.

Monos (MA15+)
Limited national release from Thursday
★★★

-

Rape victim’s painful life

The tragic story of Claire Murray is dramatised in this semidocumentary feature. At the age of 12, while attending a Catholic school in Perth, Claire was raped at knifepoint during a school camp and the rapist was never caught. In the years that followed the girl ­became withdrawn, depressed, suicidal — and eventually turned to narcotics.

After a liver transplant she was unable to kick the heroin habit. When she sought another transplant her story was taken up by the tabloid media with particularly hostile treatment accorded her by 60 Minutes.

In Wild Butterfly, Shireen Narayanan tells the story of Claire’s sad life with sympathy and muted anger directed at the way the establishment treated the unfortunate victim of rape, as well as the very judgmental news reporting. Ashleigh Zinko plays the unfortunate Claire in the dramatised scenes and is very effective — less effective, because it carries all the tropes of a cheap horror movie, is the treatment of the rapist.

Wild Butterfly (M)
Limited national screenings

★★★½

-

RELATED STORIES: The List: David Stratton’s top 10 movies of 2019 | What to watch on the small screen in 2020