But being a foreign affairs advisor, Jones manages to pull enough strings to land himself on an assignment to the Soviet Union to interview Stalin and see the country sold to the Western world as an economic utopia, for himself.Ī pair of key figures enter the story during Jones’s escapades in Moscow: the slimy New York Times expat Walter Duranty ( Peter Sarsgaard, delivering a suitably sleazy performance) who often throws extravagant, heroin-infused parties and dispatches Soviet-favoring lies for personal gain and an underutilized but terrific Vanessa Kirby’s Ada Brooks, a guarded journalist caught in the trenches. Thankfully, Holland doesn’t dwell on this kick-off for too long and instead promptly places us in the room where Jones gets laughed at by a group of high-ranking British government officials that casually dismisses his warnings about Hitler and an impending attack from the Germans. We cut to this superfluous framing device from time to time, as Chalupa tries to acknowledge Jones’s work from a different angle (albeit in a clumsy fashion), presenting him as the person whose labor became historically seminal in more ways than one. Her story gets off to a confusing start, giving us a disorienting opening segment with a dogged George Orwell ( Joseph Mawle), while he writes Animal Farm as an outspoken critic of Stalinism partly influenced by Jones’ findings. “He’s deranged,” someone suggests, but perhaps with a side of misjudged flippancy.Īdmittedly, Chalupa’s script shows certain signs of a new scribe's overeagerness. “Does he really believe everything he says,” Jones is asked about Hitler for instance, by someone who’s just read his interview with the Fuhrer. His mysterious murder was suspected to be the work of the Soviets.) And there are also passages here and there that will sound depressingly familiar to any viewer in the Trump era. (Since the film is based on true events, it’s not a spoiler to mention that Jones, who was killed the day before his 30 th birthday, paid the highest possible price. In that, the screenwriter underscores Jones’s sense of journalistic duty liberally, celebrating his instincts, bravery and unwavering ethics to tell the truth no matter what the cost might be. This is in large part thanks to first-time writer Andrea Chalupa’s clear-eyed resolve to find present-day relevancy in Jones’s heroic commitment to publishing the facts and agitating those in power, when today’s world has almost become numb to fake news. Unfortunately, it then turns Jones’s fascinating (and fascinatingly not well-known or widely told) life story as an intrepid reporter into a disorganized mélange of genres-slow-burn procedural, survival tale, film noir and so on-with some dramatic highs and occasional flourishes of gripping set pieces.Īnd yet, Holland’s film manages to get under one’s skin on the whole, remaining a compelling watch throughout in spite of its rambling feel. Jones” finds our eponymous 20-something character ( James Norton, a gentle powerhouse) while he’s high on his recent success as the fearless journalist who just interviewed Hitler, before going onto becoming the first person to expose the atrocities of the Holodomor Stalin’s man-made famine that killed millions of Ukrainians between the years 1932-33. Agnieszka Holland’s (“In Darkness”) mostly successful (if not a bit bloated) political thriller “Mr.
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