Film Review: Mr. Jones (2019)

The central character in Agnieszka Holland’s riveting account of the Ukrainian Holodomor is pursued by intrepid journalist Gareth Jones but the desired interviewee nonetheless never makes a genuine appearance. Such is fitting as the crux of the issue and the cause of the events addressed in Mr. Jones are not the makings of just one man–no matter how seemingly omnipotent Josef Stalin might have been at the height of his power in the 1930s. No, something as heinous as the Holomodor–the forced starvation, literally “to kill by starvation”–could not be the demonic fruit of a singularity. This is the intended focus of the ingenious director, Holland, who wisely relied upon her family’s experience of the Holocaust and subsequent enslavement of all of Poland under the wretched yoke of communism to portray the plight of the Ukraine under like collectivization. The starving of millions to death in the Ukraine and Southern Russia required layers of active and passive complicity coupled with a willingness to justify the sacrifice of millions of others for the realization of a subjective-but-thought-to-be-objective egalitarian utopia. This film crushes simplistic binaries. Fascism vs. communism. Monarchy vs. democracy. West vs. East. Genocide is always more nuanced than that. What this film does accomplish is to provide a historical denial that communism can succeed if only rightly, or in today’s insipid parlance, democratically applied; no, it is rotten at its core no matter its brand or branding. It is as unnatural to man as living without bread.

Perhaps the film is best understood as a long interview indeed, not with Stalin of course whose cult of personality and destruction required a notorious reclusiveness, but more so an interview with applied communism itself. Jones is the examiner who himself begins as an optimist who hopes that Stalin’s Soviet Union can provide a counter balance to the Nazis in Germany. Whether in London or Moscow, Jones sticks out as a different cat–he appears to be a genuine reporter, wooed neither by the comfort of carnal pleasure nor the solace of wishful thinking. His clear antagonist then is the New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty whose name for a brief whiff of American history was synonymous with the greatest dupes and betrayers of all time. Yet, outside of this great film, we do not hear much of Duranty, just as I used to lament when instructing in European history that, despite its centrality to modern Western history, curricula do not really allot adequate time to the French Revolution. Duranty is the worst version of Robespierre or Marat in that at least the Frenchmen were willing to get their own hands dirty (read bloody) whereas Duranty served as an accomplice to mass murder while sipping on the best wines from his luxurious Moscow flat. No wonder he won the Pulitzer Prize (still not rescinded) for his slavish, clean support of genocide–a profession of hypocrites comes to celebrate the most elaborate and eloquent hypocrisies, both then and now. Duranty, played masterfully by Peter Sarsgaard, says as much when Gareth Jones is outed for relaying the truth about the Ukraine, and the two have a chance encounter as Jones is forced out of the country: “It is too bad Mr. Jones; you could have become a great reporter.”

Wherein evil dominates, accurate predication is absent. Up is down. Down is up. Duranty is considered a great reporter, and Jones not. Truly Orwellian so it is fitting that Orwell–who came to loathe Soviet totalitarianism because of Jones’s work–appears throughout the film. What Orwell was convinced by, despite his penchant toward socialism, was Gareth Jones’s conviction borne of his eyewitness experience of the Holodomor with all of its attendant horrors. Holland brings the viewer alongside Jones as he visited the Ukraine like Dante on the heels of Vigil though a similar hell. The most poignant of scenes features two elderly men pulling a cart-turned-mass-hearse who stop to add to the pile a woman who had died on the path to the graveyard. As matter of factly as if they had grabbed a loaded garbage bag, they hoist the wailing child of the dead mother and drop him on the cart as well. He is as good as dead. The Ukraine is as good as dead.

Wrong critics of Mr. Jones have focused on some admittedly awkward inclusions and cinematic liberties taken by Holland, such as the transition-less intrusions of Orwell’s Animal Farm or an odd accelerated bike riding scene, but to spend any significant time on these mere details is to miss the significance of the truth and the history dramatically conveyed here. To be sure, I would have preferred a dogged defense of spontaneous order and free market cooperation as the right alternatives to the coercive Stalinism on full display in the film. However, Mr. Jones stands as a powerful and moving testament to the rotten nature of the “best laid plans” of the godless who nonetheless assume the roles of deities in redeeming and recreating society along all their preferred lines.

Given the geist then of our age and the demons that prowl about, do not be shocked if our contemporary Durantys ensure that this formidable film receives none of the official and sanctioned awards which it truly deserves.