News you can use
In his first western, Hanks brings gruff sincerity to role as travelling storyteller
I've never thought of Tom Hanks as having a particularly martial bearing, but the actor has had a lot of military ranks over the years. Beyond the obvious (Saving Private Ryan), there was Forrest Gump's Vietnam exploits, U.S. Navy Captain Jim Lovell in Apollo 13, Captain Phillips, Captain Sullenberger in Sully and Captain Krause in this year's war movie Greyhound. Hanks even narrated the end of the Second World War in The Pacific, and plays Colonel Tom Parker in the upcoming Elvis Presley biopic, though that title was honorary.
Still, it's no great surprise to find him playing Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd in Paul Greengrass's neo-western, News of the World. Kidd fought for the South in the Civil War, but these days (i.e., Texas in 1870) he has a far more peaceable job, travelling from town to town and reading the news out loud to anyone with a dime and the time to listen.
That calling will prove important to the story, adapted by Greengrass and Luke Davies from the 2016 novel by Paulette Jiles. But in the early going it just means Jefferson is out on the lonely but dangerous trail between two settlements when he happens upon a scene of violence and a sole survivor, 10-year-old Johanna (Helena Zengel). She was captured and raised by the Kiowa First Nation, and speaks no English.
Jefferson takes her to the nearest town, where an overworked bureaucrat tells him the local Indian Agent is out of town, so Johanna is now his responsibility. Finders keepers, if you will. The old soldier doesn't want to take Johanna to her family across the state, but he will because — well, because he's Tom Hanks, dammit! Also, he needs redemption. Fighting for the Confederacy, even if it was before the opening credits, is the worst thing Hanks has done in a movie, and I've seen Road to Perdition.
The episodic plot is thrilling, even if the camerawork is more sedate than we've come to expect from Greengrass after three Bourne movies, Green Zone and others. In one sequence, Jefferson and Johanna are trailed by three former Confederate soldiers (really evil ones!) who want to traffic the girl. Her cagey solution to his running out of ammunition is pure genius.
At another point, the two travellers blunder into Erath, an off-the-map town where a local warlord (Thomas Francis Murphy) is looking to build his own particular brand of civilization, though it's far from civil. He wants Jefferson to wow his citizens with stories of his own exploits, but he instead tempts them with the tale of mine disaster, pulled from the pages of Harper's New Monthly Magazine, then 20 years old and still publishing today.
Cinematography is by Dariusz Wolski (The Martian, several Pirates of the Caribbean movies) and it's rich and evocative, whether in the bright blaze of noon or the dark of a pre-electrified night. And Greengrass manages to capture 1870 Texas without that sort of West World effect in which everything looks like a set.
Much of the story is about the gradual rapprochement between Jefferson and Johanna, who at first sees her well-meaning deliverer as just another in a long line of careless captors. But the power of the news and the enduring strength of truth are motifs that will resonate with viewers today as much as they did 150 years ago.
And Hanks, having played legendary journalist Ben Bradlee in The Post, not to mention storyteller Walt Disney (Saving Mr. Banks), straight-shooter James B. Donovan (Bridge of Spies) and no less a truth-teller than Fred Rogers (A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood), seems uniquely positioned to argue on the side of facts.
Case in point: Filming on News of the World took place in 2019. But in one of the first scenes, Jefferson opens a newspaper to tell the people of Wichita Falls that in far-off Houston, the meningitis epidemic continues, with 97 dead. Today the disease is different and the death toll much higher. But in all the ways that matter, the news of the world never changes.