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‘Mr. Jones’: Stalin Thriller Is Saddled With Too Many Important Stories to Tell

A good idea for a biopic doesn’t always find its ideal reflection on screen. Look what happened to Leonardo DiCaprio’s J. Edgar (as in Hoover), Hilary Swank’s Amelia (as in Earhart) and Colin Farrell’s Alexander (as in the Great). To that list of stymied ambition, add Mr. Jones, as in Gareth Jones (James Norton), the Welsh journalist whose exposé of Soviet atrocities leading up to World War II pissed off so many higher-ups that he never lived to see the age of 30.

On the surface, director and screenwriter Agnieszka Holland seemed a wise choice to helm Mr. Jones, given her superb handling of such Oscar-nominated wartime dramas as Europa, Europa and In Darkness. This time, however, the Polish filmmaker — herself driven out of Poland by the communists — is saddled with a rookie script by Andrea Chalupa that can’t make up its mind about what story it wants to tell. Is it Jones grappling with the ascendency of Adolph Hitler in 1933 while his colleagues turned a deaf ear? Is it Jones traveling to the Soviet Union in that same year to blow the whistle on the Holodomor — the famine engineered by Joseph Stalin that starved millions in the Ukraine while grain was sold abroad to stuff Soviet coffers? Or is it how these events inspired George Orwell to write 1945’s Animal Farm, an allegorical fable aimed at the toxic core of Stalinist totalitarianism?