RUSSIAN HOLODOMOR KILLED MILLIONS

MONTAGE SUSPENDS DISBELIEF FOR AUDIENCE IN CINEMA REAL TIME

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Vladimir Lenin has died and the land that revolution made has passed into the iron grip of Joseph Stalin.

Director Agnieszka Holland follows the biopic journey of Welsh Journalist Gareth Jones as he leaves the class comfort of Britain for the cold of Russia during the first of Stalin’s Five Year Economic Plans in Mr. Jones (2020).

Agnieszka chooses the real story of journalists to tell the world about monsters ruling the revolutionary order.

James Norton plays Jones who travels to Moscow on a shoe string budget as a freelance foreign correspondent. Initially, Jones wants to interview Stalin himself, after attaining some notoriety interviewing German Dictator Adolf Hitler.

The ruling class and even the journalists have difficulty believing Jones’ story about being invited to share a plane with Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. So, everyone sends Jones on an impossible mission to investigate the untold story of famine in 1933 Ukraine.

Peter Sarsgaard plays New York Times Moscow bureau chief Walter Duranty. Duranty won a Pulitzer a few years before, but he is gradually revealed to have an agenda in support of a positive outcome for the Russian Revolution.

Vanessa Kirby plays Times journalist Ada Brooks. Brooks befriends Jones and gives him a bit of nudge toward the story of the decade.

Agnieszka uses the one main narrative about Jones uncovering the story of famine, but then also intertwines a secondary narrative that paradoxically underwrites the overall vision of the film.

This secondary narrative involves intermittent scenes of George Orwell. Orwell has just published his memoir, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933).

Joseph Mawle portrays Orwell as reserved but insightful, and a determined writer in every sense of the occupation.

Jones meets Orwell on a few occasions, but Orwell is also shown alone at his writing desk typing in the lines of the allegorical novella, Animal Farm (1944). In this way, Orwell is also used as a narrator from time to time.

Agnieszka uses film montage to create several beautiful scenes involving train travel. Scenes are condensed and overlapped on the trip as one short shot bleeds into another short shot to symbolize more time and space transpiring than in cinema real time. 

The scenes then become very dark during the days and the nights of a Moscow winter.

Agnieszka creates depth in scenes by often filming with at least two actors in the same scene, and then either filming the foreground in focus and the background in a blur, or vice versa.

Filming then moves to white, bleak and desolate scenes as Jones uncovers more of the truth in the Ukraine.

Agnieszka shows great overall vision by gradually transitioning the audience from comfort to extreme discomfort as the famine becomes realized as a man-made famine to create genocide. The director has changed the atmosphere altogether just before Jones is arrested as a spy.

Agnieszka  is a very busy director, meticulously ensuring a full cinema experience by giving the background a voice either through music everywhere or the sound of the train on the tracks down below or machines in the yards in the distance or seabirds overhead near the ocean.

Mr. Jones was released in North America in 2020. The biopic film is currently available on Apple TV as Movie of the Week.