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After interviewing Adolf Hitler, aspiring Welsh journalist Gareth Jones wants to travel to Moscow to interview Joseph Dzhugashvili Stalin, the bright hope of communism. Jones obtains a visa and reaches Moscow, where he meets New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty who informs him that all foreign journalists are not allowed to leave the capital or inquire about what happens across the Soviet Union. While traveling in a train with Soviet foreign minister Litvinov, Jones secretly boards another train and exits in Ukraine. He witnesses Holodomor, Ukrainians dying because the communists confiscated their food. Back in Moscow, Litvinov warns Jones not to tell anyone about the famine or six British engineers will be executed. Jones defies and warns what happened, even though the public ignores him. After media mogul William Hurst publishes his story, it gains widespread attention.
While other countries have foreigners making adulation and tribute movies about them, Russia is stuck with almost every second foreign movie damning and vilifying it and its criminal history. One such example is Agnieszka Holland's biopic "Mr. Jones" about Gareth Jones, one of the rare foreign journalists witnessing Holodomor, the second worst genocide in human history. It starts off with bright colors, depicting Jones initially having naive hope in communism and Stalin, until he arrives to Soviet Union and slowly sobers up, realizing it is a degenerate dictatorship, whereby the colors become grey and bleak, until Jones comes to warn people about the dangers of communism. it is a pity the crucial segment—showing Jones encountering corpses on the ground and people starving due to famine in Ukraine—is too meagre and spans only around 15 minutes of the film's running time, since a more elaborate depiction of this rarely mentioned crime would have been better. The rest of the film is more of a contemplation about journalistic integrity, 'ostrich effect' and pliability of various interest groups in Britain who ignored Soviet crimes in order to insist on an economic cooperation with the Soviet Union, embodied in the cowardly character of Walter Duranty, the New York Times correspondent who became a Stalinist collaborator and Holodomor denialist-propagandist in the media. The ploys, lies, ideological fundamentalism and threats of Soviet officials feel familiar even today. While more inspiration and a tighter narrative would have been welcomed, "Mr. Jones" is a well made history lesson.
Grade:++
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