Paul Greengrass, nowadays mostly known for his Bourne movies with Matt Damon, has re-teamed with Tom Hanks, the star of his 2013 film, Captain Phillips, for News of the World, a kind of western road-movie, adapted by Greengrass and Luke Davies from Paulette Jiles’ 2016 novel.
Tom hanks plays Captain Kidd, a civil war veteran who earns his living by travelling from town to town and reading a selection of the news from a variety of newspapers for people who pay ten cents to attend his readings. The folks are mainly interested in local news and don’t care much about federal news, let alone world news. Thus, the formula which made Fox News so popular existed long ago.
He accepts an assignment to deliver a young girl that he names Johanna (Helena Zengel), who has been raised by Indians, back to her people. There are shades of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) but Captain Kidd is as different from Ethan Edwards as Tom Hanks is different from John Wayne. Captain Kidd does not have any of Edwards’s hate and racial prejudices. He is a calm, kind, educated liberal. He has fought in a bitter war and knows the value of peace.
We follow the road that the Captain and the girl travel. The travels form a series of mini stories, like the Coen Brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018), but with a lot less creativity. In one we have three outlaws chasing them, ending in a fairly exciting shootout atop mountains. In another he visits a group of workers exploited by their ruthless and racist boss, who asks the Captain to read from a self-published newsletter glorifying his deeds. But the Captain, in true Hanks style instead reads the men stories of workers uprising to obtain their rights from bosses who have been exploiting them. Needless to say, the big boss is not best pleased, thus providing Greengrass to set up another confrontation.
The Captain and the girl encounter a tribe of Indians. These are not the Indians pf the old westerns who would attack and skin you. We are dealing with a revisionist western and this tribe, seeing that the Captain’s horse has perished, offer him a new horse. In fact, the real savages are Johanna’s aunt and uncle, a German couple to whom Captain temporarily entrusts Johana. They tie her to a wooden stick while doing their daily work to keep her from running away.
News of the World tells us that if you are a good person and do good things then good things will happen to you. That the good always triumphs over evil and bigots and racists will be defeated. This message would have been common in the films of the golden Hollywood era but in the current climate they seem a bit out of place and out of date. However, there are many who welcome such comforting, life affirming messages in the current world of cinema where usually the films are less optimistic and show a darker side of the world. News of the World provides a couple of hours of solid entertainment with beautiful vistas of American west as photographed by Dariusz Wolski, accompanied by James Newton Howard’s score. Performance are all very good, with special mention going to Helena Zengel.
Next on Greengrass’s directing slate is a new version of George Orwell’s 1984. Don’t expect that to have so much sugar in its mix and show a rosy picture of the world where the good people always win. Meanwhile, you can catch News of the World on Netflix.
© 2021. UniversalCinema Mag.