Many of my Facebook friends have been praising Mr. Jones with great enthusiasm. So I was surprised, on watching it the other day, at how much I didn’t like it. Like too many historical dramas, it seemed to settle for being “important” and didactic rather than telling a story. None of the characters learn anything, or change in any way, except perhaps George Orwell who appears as something combining a narrator and a cameo. (Even this is handled ineptly, through the ludicrous device of having him read out loud to nobody at all from his own book.) And without a character learning or changing in some important way, you simply do not have a story. You have instead a fictionalized documentary.
The film also suffers pretty obviously from its own low budget. Depicting Stalin’s Ukrainian genocide—the worst man-made disaster, not counting wars, since the Black Death—through a handful of encounters with perhaps a dozen people was just not very cinematic. That may not be the fault of the filmmakers, who seem to have done the best they could with what they had in this regard, but it still failed to portray the real scope of the incident. Overall, it came off feeling like an educational film instead of a drama, and while it’s certainly a worthwhile subject for a movie, it does not approach such other anti-communist films as The Lives of Others, Night Crossing, or The Inner Circle. I wish filmmakers would re-read chapter 23 of Aristotle's Poetics. You cannot convincingly put an entire war on the stage. Better to tell a smaller-scale story about people the audience can relate to, that conveys the impression of the whole.
Even worse was Radioactive, a biopic about Marie Curie. In addition to an atmosphere of low-budget cheapness—a flaw it shares with Mr. Jones; these films are so obviously filmed on soundstages and greenscreens that watching them feels like being in a holodeck simulation!—the film is so poorly written as to lead essentially to the opposite conclusion from that which the filmmakers apparently wanted viewers to reach. The action is interspersed with references to incidents involving atomic energy (the Hiroshima bombing, the atomic tests of the sixties, the Chernobyl disaster) and it concludes with Curie, in a sort of hallucination, meeting the victims of radioactive poisoning or bombing in a series of hospital wards. It’s clear, however, that the filmmakers are not trying to condemn Curie; on the contrary, in a long and dull speech at the end, her dead husband tries to explain to her that there is much good that has resulted from the discovery of atomic energy. Yet we’re not shown any of these benefits. Only the evils of atomic power are dramatized, and almost none of its blessings. In the credits, we’re told that X-rays and treatments for cancer have saved lots of lives, but that’s virtually all. Thus the effort to show that despite its downsides, atomic power has a lot of benefits, does not succeed, and one comes away with the sense of a sort of tragedy that wasn’t supposed to be a tragedy. A film basically fighting with itself.
Perhaps just as bad is that the film never actually explains radioactivity to the audience, except at almost the very end, in a scene in which Curie is lecturing to some students. This comes long after the scene in which she and her husband purport to explain radioactivity at a dinner with some friends—a scene livened with nice computer graphics…that never actually show us what radioactivity is! It’s quite ineptly done. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Curie comes off as an intensely unlikeable woman, utterly unsympathetic, who has some good lines about wanting to be judged for her science rather than her sex, but is so emotionally out-of-whack as to appear as a highly disagreeable spokesman for that point of view. Pierre comes off as an authentically good person—and she as entirely unworthy of his affection. Her relationship with Paul Langevin is even worse; it leaves the viewer entirely cold. This is all a shame, because there are few people as fascinating as, or more worthy of the biopic treatment than, Marie Curie.
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