Jones. (15.)
Directed by Agnieska Holland.
Starring James Norton, Vanessa Kirby, Peter Sarsgaard, Joseph Mawle and Kenneth Cranham. 103 mins.
Fresh from interviewing Hitler and Goebbels on their plane, youthful idealist Mr Gareth Jones (Norton) finds that his services are no longer needed as secretary to PM Lloyd George (Cranham), so he pops over to Russia to find out the secret of Stalin's economic miracle. This turns out to be the systematic starvation of millions of people in Ukraine, which is being covered up by the state and western reporters sympathetic to the USSR.
Holland's film is like an anti-Reds. (Reds? Warren Beatty – three hour Oscar epic about the American journalist who covered the Russian revolution? No, nothing? How quickly Oscar chasing historical drama is forgotten.) It's a small scale, overcast affair but handsomely mounted, with what I took to be little visual quotes from Soviet film theory of the time and a striking score by Antoni Lazarkiewicz.
A world teetering on disaster; the need for objectives journalism; standing up to dictators – the film has all the contemporary parallels you could want. But sometimes History isn't just a thing for us to learn from and Mr Jones main merits are its insights into a fascinating period and the pleasure of a taking a break from the now.
Directed by Agnieska Holland.
Starring James Norton, Vanessa Kirby, Peter Sarsgaard, Joseph Mawle and Kenneth Cranham. 103 mins.
Fresh from interviewing Hitler and Goebbels on their plane, youthful idealist Mr Gareth Jones (Norton) finds that his services are no longer needed as secretary to PM Lloyd George (Cranham), so he pops over to Russia to find out the secret of Stalin's economic miracle. This turns out to be the systematic starvation of millions of people in Ukraine, which is being covered up by the state and western reporters sympathetic to the USSR.
Holland's film is like an anti-Reds. (Reds? Warren Beatty – three hour Oscar epic about the American journalist who covered the Russian revolution? No, nothing? How quickly Oscar chasing historical drama is forgotten.) It's a small scale, overcast affair but handsomely mounted, with what I took to be little visual quotes from Soviet film theory of the time and a striking score by Antoni Lazarkiewicz.
A world teetering on disaster; the need for objectives journalism; standing up to dictators – the film has all the contemporary parallels you could want. But sometimes History isn't just a thing for us to learn from and Mr Jones main merits are its insights into a fascinating period and the pleasure of a taking a break from the now.
