News of the World: Poignant Tom Hanks Western an Astute Mirror of Current Times
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B+
Tom Hanks stars in his first Western, director Paul Greengrass’ carefully crafted, high-minded News of the World, a gently paced film that aims to lend a healing touch and some insight into America’s political wounds.
Though the year is 1870, the movie resonates with 2020 themes. The country is torn along partisan lines, rife with anti-immigrant and racial hostilities, and there’s an outbreak of disease throughout Texas.
The central action involves a long horse ride that Captain Kidd (Hanks) takes with a 10-year-old girl who speaks no English. Years before the child, Johanna, was kidnapped by the Kiowa tribe, who killed her German immigrant parents and raised the flaxen-haired child as their own.
Now she has been retaken and is supposed to be sent to her nearest living relatives, but her guardian has been killed and she is alone. When no one else is willing to help, the Captain decides to travel four-hundred miles to reunite her with her nearest German immigrant relatives in the southern Texas town of Castroville.
When Paulette Jiles’ novel, from which the film was adapted, was published in 2016, reviewers drew comparisons to similar plots in Charles Portis’s twice-filmed True Grit and John Ford’s 1956 epic The Searchers, with John Wayne on a five-year mission to recapture a niece captured by Comanche warriors.
That film is often credited with introducing a shadowy ambivalence into the Western myth and Greengrass, who analyzed Ford’s work in the Netflix WWII documentary series Five Came Back, has acknowledged his debt to the Western master.
Stylistically, he has shifted his usually frenetic docudrama style to cinematographer Dariusz Wolski’s more classic framing in the external daytime scenes. Town scenes use more handheld cameras, and the nights, where Kidd performs by gaslight lanterns, give the scenes rich textures of light and shadow.
The staging also suggests these public readings — a mixture of politics, drama, and comedy — were the movie palaces of their day, connecting the small settler communities to the great world outside.
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Like any epic, News of the World is full of episodic traps and moments of reprieve as Kidd and his young companion meet people both evil and kindly along the way. The longest sustained action sequence involves a group of men led by a human trafficker (Michael Angelo Covino) who wants to acquire the child. Elizabeth Marvel is humane as a worldly innkeeper who keeps the Captain company for the night and speaks enough Kiowa to learn something of Johanna’s past.
There’s also a darkly surreal interlude (equivalent to cyclops cave scene in Ulysses… or maybe the Trump presidency) when Kidd and Johanna find themselves caught in a part of the country run by a racist local warlord, Farley (Thomas Francis Murphy) who keeps the townsfolk in cult-like obeisance.
He demands Kidd read his own version of the news rather than the newspapers. When Kidd declines, the only way out is through gunfire. One of Farley’s foot soldiers, a simple young man (Fred Hechinger) proves an unexpected ally, though Kidd declines his offer to become a companion on their journey.
News of the World is executed with scrupulous attention to production values and performed with emotional restraint, though enjoyment come with some qualifications. The legacy of a civil war over slavery and the mass displacement of Native Americans is narrowed down to a fine point — the bond that forms between an exceedingly conscientious but enigmatic former Confederate officer, and one inarticulate child. (Native Americans appear only in the background, once in a mist, another time emerging from a dust-storm. Only black character appears, a lynching victim.)
Hanks and young German actress Helena Zengel (Shock System) play off each other faultlessly, with minimal dialogue, relying on gaze, gesture, and tone and we can easily understand how the twice-orphaned Johanna can look into Kidd’s warm, melancholy gaze and recognize a fellow misfit and survivor, accepting him as her protector.
At the same time, her character’s function in the film is, essentially, to reveal the core decency of Hanks’ character, which is never the deepest challenge. You may recall how a volleyball named Wilson did the job brilliantly in Castaway.
News of the World. Directed by Paul Greengrass. Written by Paul Greengrass and Luke Davies. Starring Tom Hanks, Helena Zengel, Elizabeth Marvel, Michael Angelo Covino, Thomas Francis Murphy and Fred Hechinger. Opens in select theatres December 25.