By Tom Siebert
I could have driven last month from my home in Illinois, where the theaters are closed due to the worsening COVID-19 crisis, to see “News of the World” in adjacent Indiana, where they are open.
But no movie is literally to die for. This one, however, comes pretty close.
Following a pandemic-limited theater release on Dec. 25, this late Christmas gift opened today on several streaming services including Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Vudu where I watched it for a pricey-but-well-worth-it $13.99.
“News of the World” is an epic, broad shoulder of a film bulging with wisdom, gravitas, and goodness.
Cinematic supernova Tom Hanks is reunited with his “Captain Philips” director Paul Greengrass to play a different sort of captain, Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a former Confederate infantryman in post-Civil War-torn Texas.
Captain Kidd is kind of a grizzly, Old West Wolf Blitzer who makes a meager living horse-and-buggy riding from town to town, reading the news to “anyone who has ten cents and the time to hear it.”
Although set in 1870, “News of the World” is very much a movie for our time, from an early scene where the itinerant newsman tells a wide-eyed crowd about a meningitis outbreak ravaging across the Texas panhandle, to the historic backdrop of a fractured country trying to put itself back together, to the clash of cultures depicted among Southerners, Northerners, and Native Americans.
Kidd both entertains and edifies his largely illiterate audiences but draws a journalistic line in the dirt by refusing to read the news rag of a racist Erath County publisher whose reports brag about driving the Mexicans, Blacks, and “Indians” out of a battle-won settlement.
The captain’s straight news world is turned upside down one day when he rides upon the terrifying tableau of a lynched Black man, an overturned covered wagon, and a German girl who is dressed in Native American attire.
Kidd can read people too, so he quickly ascertains from the young girl’s effects that her name is Johanna and she is “an orphan twice over,” her parents having been killed by members of the Kiowa tribe, who were later slaughtered by the white man.
The captain then takes the traumatized and untrusting girl to a nearby checkpoint, where Union officials instruct him to return Johanna to the farmstead of her surviving aunt and uncle in Castroville, near San Antonio.
Along the 400-mile trek from Wichita Falls, the improbable duo flee from a blinding dust storm, two gun-toting––and shooting––renegades who wanted to purchase Johanna for fifty dollars, and a civil uprising caused by Kidd’s narration of a newspaper article about a killer coal mine that collapsed due to unsafe conditions.
Johanna is played by 12-year-old Helena Zengel, who may be the most-gifted German actress discovered since Hollywood found Marlene Dietrich nearly a hundred years ago.
The blonde-haired Helena more than holds her own with the world’s top movie star, whether she is acting the wild child who insists on eating with her hands, deftly securing a horse from an Indian tribe after the couple’s wagon crashes, or softly singing a mournful ode in a graveyard of bloodied buffaloes.
And Tom Hanks is, well, Tom Hanks, merging the Everyman hero of Jimmy Stewart's roles with the quiet integrity of Henry Fonda's.
The two-time Best Actor winner is deeply in the moment throughout this moving movie, his world-weary character seeming to carry all the pain and pathos of a war that took the lives of nearly 700,000 fellow Americans.
As usual he is surrounded by an incandescent cast, which includes Neil Sandilands, Thomas Francis Murphy, Mare Winningham, Elizabeth Marvel, Chukwudu Iwuju, and Ray McKinnon.
The film is based on the novel of the same name by Paulette Giles and shot stunningly by cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, who captures the vast dusty plains and rugged mountains of the Southwest in brilliant focus.
Like the news itself, "News of the World" keeps coming at you with relentless speed and tragedy. But its ending is surprisingly hopeful and some may even say happy.
The theme of this sweeping film could be interpreted as moving on from bad memories and trying to make good ones.
“We’re all hurting,” Captain Kidd says. “But we have to stop fighting sometime.”
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