Texas, 1870. The splendidly named Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks) travels from town to town as a “newsreader,” which is exactly what it sounds like – he selects the most interesting recent items from newspapers and magazines, and reads them aloud to locals for a dime, so that they may hear “the great changes that are happening out there.” He’s a mixture of reporter and storyteller, and something like a folklorist as well; Kidd was also a preacher once upon a time, and that’s not too surprising either. “It’s not a rich man’s occupation,” he chuckles, but it’s a respectable one. More importantly, it allows him to travel and work free of any real commitments or connections. And then, in spite of himself, he makes one.
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Captain Kidd is the focus of “News of the World,” the new film from Paul Greengrass, and a reunion of the director and Hanks, his “Captain Phillips” star. They’re a good match; Greengrass is well aware of how much melancholy and determination Hanks can put across with a carefully placed and well-timed close-up, and Hanks knows that, within Greengrass’ big canvases, he can do the kind of small acting he does best.
And to be sure, much of what he’s doing here is indicative, and reactive. Between towns, Kidd makes a grisly discovery: an overturned and ransacked wagon, its Black driver hanging from a tree, and a frightened girl watching nearby. She’s called Johanna (and is played by Helena Zengel). She’s blonde and white but speaks the Kiowa tongue; the driver was transporting her to federal authorities after her tribe was wiped out. “This child is an orphan, twice over,” Kidd is told. That tribe, he subsequently realizes, had themselves taken her from her birth family. He tries to hand her off to authorities himself, but no dice; ultimately, he realizes he’ll have to take her to what’s left of her extended family himself.
It’s a long and difficult journey, in which they face a series of increasingly threatening antagonists, built by Greengrass as a series of pointed set pieces. A trio of frontier scumbags try to “buy” Johanna, and turn murderous when Kidd refuses; their extended, scary standoff and shoot-out is an ace piece of action filmmaking, as Greengrass draws out the tension of the encounter with long, quietly thrilling sections of silence and suspense.
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Even more terrifying is their visit to Erath County, where they’re met at the border by men with shotguns who are resistant to Captain Kidd’s mission; perusing his papers, one sneers, “We’re building a whole new world down here in Erath County, but ain’t none of that in here.” Their idea of “a whole new world” involves pushing out “Mexicans and Injuns,” under the orders of Mr. Farley (Thomas Francis Murphy), the exploitative and racist overlord of the area, and the star of its propaganda paper, which he publishes himself. (You can make the timely connections without much strain.) Kidd is pressed to read this “official” news, and ingeniously turns the situation to his advantage, but what sells the sequence is Greengrass’s staging: it’s like a trip to the bowels of hell, all fire and flesh and bad vibes.
Greengrass is a terrific filmmaker but a decidedly contemporary one, smart enough to know that he’s working in a more conventional genre, and he thus (mostly) eschews his signature flourishes for a more classical style. He doesn’t seem cramped by the demand; quite the contrary, in fact, as his frames pulse with affection for the wide vistas and sun-cracked skies. (James Newton Howard’s crackerjack score is also an asset.) Some of the digital effects are mighty dodgy (and, let’s be honest, unnecessary; if Ford and Hawks could do these things practically, so could Greengrass). But that’s nitpicking. Most importantly, he understands the political and emotional stakes of the setting, in a way that some Westerns don’t even acknowledge, nodding to the tensions of post-Civil War America, and how Kidd attempts, in some small way, to soothe them.
It’s semi-shocking that Hanks hadn’t fronted a Western before this one, so ideally suited is he to play the Western hero – a walking personification of homespun values, presumed morality, and the many qualities summoned up by the phrase “all-American man” (at least in its complimentary sense). Hanks isn’t channeling the gruff frontiersman, but an intellectual of sorts; it’s a James Stewart or Gary Cooper role, rather than a John Wayne. And maybe his presence, and its implications, rob the picture of some sense of danger or unpredictability, but that may well be the point; when you saw these movies, you always knew the hero stood on the side of right, and that heroism was part of the package. What Hanks brings to the character is an emotional depth; the sadness in his eyes, in the film’s climactic scenes, is absolutely bottomless. And that matters, since the closing scenes are not based on a big shoot-out, but a simple man coming to terms with his own grief.
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Greengrass surrounds his star with a stellar ensemble, including Ray McKinnon, Elizabeth Marvel (solidifying the already unmistakable connection to “True Grit”), and Bill Camp (who only has one scene, but it’s a beaut). Yet the revelation here is Zengel, who has says little (none of it in English), yet has the presence and gravitas of a silent film actor, putting across her history and trauma primarily in her haunted eyes and loaded expressions. That all comes flooding to the fore in a heartbreaker of a homecoming scene, the moment the picture truly elevates to greatness, as she approaches Hanks, takes his hand, and walks him away as the sun creeps into the lens. That’s myth-making, right there, the marriage of earned emotion and natural beauty. That’s what the Western does best, and “News of the World” deserves comparison with the best of them. [A]
“News of the World” arrives in theaters on December 25 in the US and on Netflix around the world.