Mr Jones Review Bearing Witness to Stalins Evil 2020 06 19

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The field of wheat seen early in Mr. Jones sways prettily under the sun. The director Agnieszka Holland lingers on the image, then shifts to a man busily typing in a house nearby. Hes unkempt and unidentified but you will likely guess his name when he mentions talking farm animals and begins narrating his once-upon-a-time nightmare: Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night. The man is George Orwell (Joseph Mawle), who then disappears. In short order, so do most of the animals that Holland scatters here and there a pretty cat, a few pigeons, squealing pigs, the rabbit adorning a mans walking stick. Taking their place is the lonely figure of Gareth Jones (James Norton). Based on a real Welsh journalist, he is the unassuming hero of this grim, quietly furious movie, which revisits Joness 1933 trip to Ukraine, then in the grip of a catastrophic famine. There, the world is barren and the grain Stalins gold, as someone casually calls it is gone. A political thriller with an insistent, steady pulse (the script is by Andrea Chalupa), Mr. Jones dramatizes a harrowing chapter in the life of a man long overlooked by history. It opens in the early 1930s with Gareth reporting on his recent trip to Germany. Hes in one of those ominous centers of power burnished wood, cigarette smoke, crepuscular lighting sharing his worries about Hitler and Goebbels to a gathering of officious harumphers, including his employer, David Lloyd George, the former prime minister. Its a nice bit of scene setting. Minutes later Jones is chatting on a phone in Russian, and not long after hes in Moscow, en route to an unspeakable tragedy. The early Moscow scenes move briskly, creating a churn of faces and names that dont yet mean much to Gareth and may not mean anything to the unschooled. Its a purposeful whirl that conveys the chaos that he experiences as he gets his bearings and