The previously unheralded Welsh political advisor/reporter Gareth Jones gets the star treatment as the titular character in the film. At the open Jones has just returned from Berlin having had the opportunity to interview Adolf Hitler with Goering riding shotgun in a state of the art German plane. Jones had the impression that Hitler was motivated and determined with Goering speaking to the goal of the 1000 year Reich which Jones cannot imagine occurring without German expansion with Poland being the likely first target. The British great minds including his mentor fellow Welshman David Lloyd George laugh him off establishing a pattern of Jones' intuition being correct but finding himself alone with that perspective.
Due to budget cuts Jone loses his position as principal secretary to Lloyd George but asks for one last favour of George's office arranging a trip to Moscow for him for him to interview Stalin. George who is fluent in Russian thanks to his mother's past history of teaching Ukraine and his studies of the language at Cambridge also saw early the necessity of an alliance with the Soviets to counter the rising German threat. He also had questions about the Russian Utopia. Where was all the money coming from for the great Russian expansion? The ruble was worthless yet they were building palace-like hotels and the top British Engineers were in the country working on many industrial projects.
Director Agnieszka Holland crafts a tale out of Andrea Chalupa's screenplay the latter's family having roots in the country. She points to the alternative motives that many politicians and businessmen had that gave them problems with the truth. Chief among them was Walter Duranty (Peter Sarsgaard) a Pulitzer prize winning journalist with a fondness for debauchery and suppression of the truth a useful foreign voice for Stalin that kept him in place in the Russian capital for over a decade. The narrative also mixes in an alternate story of George Orwell (Joseph Mawle) at his typewriter penning Animal Farm said to be inspired by Jones with the owner of the farm in the book sporting his name.
Jones' cunning and curiosity leads him to the Ukraine where he discovers the true nature of events in the territory The people are starving, lying frozen and dead in the streets and outside of farmhouses. Orphaned children are forced to go to unthinkable levels to keep themselves and siblings nourished as the territories grain is being shipped back to Moscow to keep appearances there. Jones documents and catalogs it all barely escaping the clutches of the secret police with Duranty's help to get back to London naively expecting support to tell the world of his findings. Instead, he is discredited and forced back to Wales where he finds an unexpected ally to get his story out.
Gareth Jones was another voice that early on saw the future danger of Hitler and Stalin. James Norton is vulnerable yet determined as Jones. Look for Vanessa Kirby as Jones' confidant Moscow based colleague of Durany Ava Brooks and the duality of Kryzysztof Piecyznski as Maxim Litvinov head of Foreign Affairs for Stalin.
Mr. Jones is a story that again points to the theory that the best and brightest generation of first sons was wiped out during The Great War leaving lesser minds to rule and make decisions in the 1930s. Andrea Chalupa's script can serve as a warning for today as leaders of global powers move to consolidate their positions or take a more nationalist approach in other instances. Seeming to show once again that history not learned from is doomed to be repeated.
***1/2 Out of Four.
Mr. Jones | Agnieszka Holland | Poland /U.K. / Ukraine | 2019 | 119 Minutes.
Tags: Russia, Moscow, Ukraine, Famine, Grain, Starvation, Secret Police, New York Times, Pulitzer Prize, William Randolph Hearst.
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