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NEWS OF THE WORLD
Director: Paul Greengrass Cast: Tom Hanks, Helena Zengel, Ray McKinnon, Elizabeth Marvel, Michael Angelo Covino, Mare Winningham, Thomas Francis Murphy, Neil Sandilands, Winsome Brown, Bill Camp MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:58 Release Date: 12/25/20; 1/15/21 (digital & on-demand) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 24, 2020 The man travels across Texas, stopping in little towns to read newspapers from around the world to the locals, whose lives are too busy to spend time reading or whose educations haven't afforded them the ability to read. This is shortly after the Civil War, and Texas is at an impasse between holding on to things the way they were and the inevitable future. People latch on to the stories within in the state and even ones from far off places, telling of ordinary folks overcoming some challenge that seems impossible. When the news gets to the federal government and notices about a collection of Constitutional amendments that need to be passed, though, those same folks get angry, yelling about the "blues," soldiers trying to keep the peace and not helping out much in any pragmatic way, and the rights proposed by those amendments, to a group of people these Texans believe are inferior. There's an intriguing idea put forth by these scenes in News of the World, which ultimately goes down an entirely different path than the one established by the title and the movie's early scenes. The news-reader, a veteran of the recent war, is soft-spoken, straightforward, and diplomatic in his approach to telling these stories and facing the occasional outburst from the audience. We don't know the political or deeper beliefs of Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks)—whether he agrees with the changes being put forth in Washington, D.C., or if his sympathies lie with the angry townspeople or if there's some middle ground he'd rather find. His job, though, isn't to say what he believes. It's to give people information and to calm the angrier, more violent attitudes that information inflames among certain people. Stories, in other words, exist as facts, but the storyteller is the one with power. The storyteller decides which stories to tell, how to tell them, and what those decisions, within the context of things going on outside of the stories, mean to the listener. It's a pretty obvious observation, but within this context of a place filled with people who are hurting and are filled with uncertainty and have no clue what their lives will be like in the near future, there's a certain power to this particular story's concept. The storyteller doesn't just tell about the world as it is. He or she can determine how people will perceive the world as it is and as it could be. It's a shame, then, that director Paul Greengrass and Luke Davies' screenplay (adapted from the novel by Paulette Jiles) seems unable or unwilling to do anything of substance with this notion. The story, which begins with some broad ideas about political unrest and the capacity of a storyteller do something about it, quickly becomes something else entirely. Kidd, a man with plenty of pain and regret and uncertainty in his own life, finds a young girl, abandoned and hiding near the scene of a raid and racially motivated lynching. Her name was previously Johanna (Helena Zengel), but now it's the Kiowa people's word for "cicada." The family of her birth was killed by the Kiowa, and now, the Kiowa who adopted her have been killed by the cavalry. Kidd is volunteered to bring the girl to the only family she has left—on a farm beyond the Red River, close enough to Kidd's own home, which he hasn't seen in five years. The concerns and plotting of the story expand, for sure, becoming an adventure, in which the unlikely pair encounters an assortment of foes and perils, and a sweet tale about lonely souls making a connection, despite the language barrier between them, on the road toward each one's home. The story itself, though, shrinks in its aims and purpose. A whole world of stories and the storyteller's ability to make sense of them becomes restricted to little more than an extended series of escapades, filled with dangers, violence, chases, and scenes in which our mysterious protagonists bond either through comedy or in shared misery. All of this is given the requisite, superficial senses of scope and excitement by Greengrass, who (with cinematographer Dariusz Wolski) gives us the wide open spaces of the desert, as well as the naturally lit terrains and interiors, and a few effective action sequences (A game of cat-and-mouse in the hills, where some human predators want the girl for awful things, serves as the standout centerpiece). It's performed well enough, too, with the reliable Hanks playing a man whose demons have quieted him and newcomer Zengel communicating hushed anguish. Most of what has happened to these characters is left a mystery for some amount of time, so we're left with an admirably restrained mood of unspeakable sorrow. Besides the mostly abandoned through line of Kidd's profession (A scene in a rogue town, where an oligarch tries to keep society the way it was, offers the clearest depiction of the storyteller's potential to create change), there could be so much more here, though. While handsomely mounted and noble in its intentions, News of the World feels as if it's holding back on its strongest ideas for the relative comfort of familiar ones. Copyright © 2020 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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(for violence, disturbing images, thematic material and some language)
