Mr Jones, A review by Philip Owen, Volga Trader
Aa someone involved with Russia and a Welshman, I had to see the film, “Mr Jones”. it is still not on general release in the UK, although Curzon Cinemas are showing it from April. Small arts cinemas are showing it now. I saw the cinema film “Mr Jones” at Cinema&Co, a small cinema club in Swansea. Most other people in the audience were from the Swansea Ukrainian Association plus some Latvians and Estonians with their spouses.
The film is much more watchable than I expected. Given the difficult subject matter, a massive famine that killed millions, I expected it either a very worthy but boring drama documentary or a Ukrainian nationalist rant. The film was true to Jones’s opinion expressed in his work. Jones did not suggest that the Holomodor was directed at Ukrainians. He thought it was directed at independent peasants; former Kulaks and Stolypin Peasants. With the exception of one phrase from a peasant woman, which could even have been an expression of Orthodox faith, the film avoided the nationalist/class war argument. The film just showed the misery of the people. The locations were very similar to the real thing. I have been to the Russian Embassy in London and the Metropole Hotel in Moscow. They found very similar settings in which to film.
At the time of the famine, there was also a major spy trial in Moscow. The Moscow scenes included the imprisonment of the 6 Metropolitan Vickers engineers arrested for spying. I worked for AEI, the successor company to MetroVick. In the company history I read, the spying trial was an excuse by the Soviet Union not to pay for the turbines to power Moscow’s electricity supply that had already been delivered.
There were references to how foreign correspondents in Moscow could be trapped by debauchery, domestic bliss otherwise unavailable to a crippled war hero and simple blackmail. I suspect knowledge of this history is why modern journalists over react with criticism of the government to signal that they are not being coerced.
The English actors who tried Welsh accents did not overdo it. No one in the audience groaned. They intoned with modest Welsh inflections for a sentence or two and then slipped into standard English. James Nolan, the actor who played Jones spoke Russian to camera. He did not attempt to speak Welsh on camera. In his Welsh language conversations the actors were behind a window so the Welsh conversation could be dubbed. The Russian, Ukrainian and Welsh dialogues are all subtitled. The original Jones spoke Russian very well. His mother was governess to John Hughes’ grandchildren and later taught English to the workers at Hughes’ factories before returning to Wales.
It is a dramatisation not a documentary. Jones previous trips to Russia are not referred to.
The film is a conflation of two trips made by Jones out of Moscow both unofficial. One in 1931 was with Jack Heinz III, also a young man. Heinz was exploring how tinned food might be used to alleviate famine. Herbert Hoover had set up USAID to help alleviate the 1921-22 famine. The Heinz family supported him. They travelled to Hughesovka, then Stalino now Donetsk and the centre of Welsh investment in the Russian Empire. The other trip was in 1933, alone, to Kharkiv. Jones jumped off the train to avoid his handler and trekked 40 miles through the winter snow to observe life in the villages. The scenes of the famine in the country around Stalino/Hughesovka were too episodic. Each was a separate picture of a new horror. They could have been joined together better. There could have been more of Jones’s backstory and his mother’s adventures. His real motivations probably included more personal issues than the film showed. Also, in real life, he probably did not walk through the countryside alone. He probably received support from former contacts of his mother. but did not reveal it in his writing to protect them from the NKVD. I will be fascinated to see if this film is shown in Russia. It is already selling out in Ukraine and Poland.
4 to 5 stars. I will watch it again but I am a specialist.
