The year is 1870. Federal troops occupy the defeated South. In Wichita Falls, Texas, a former Confederate soldier by the name of Jefferson Kyle Kidd is reading newspapers to a roomful of townspeople. His performance finished. He will collect 10 cents a person and then ride along to the next hamlet on the road.
As played by Tom Hanks, News of the World’s Captain Kidd is in many ways an archetypal Western hero. Emotionally and physically tough and possessed of an inborn sense of right and wrong, the protagonist of the new film by Paul Greengrass is the kind of man who knows to seek the high ground when ambushed and thinks nothing of adding his own strength to his wagon team’s in a pinch. What he doesn’t know, and must learn in due course, is how to make himself vulnerable to the love of a child. That lesson, having fueled Westerns from 1915’s Broncho Billy and the Baby to 2010’s True Grit, is adequately rendered in Greengrass’s practiced hands. What it isn’t, quite, is sufficient to rescue a movie that is too plodding and pedantic to succeed.
News of the World begins in earnest on the road outside of Wichita Falls, where Kidd discovers a solitary child who has been hiding in the woods. Johanna (Helena Zengel), the daughter of murdered German settlers, has been raised by the Kiowa Tribe and speaks only their language. Recognizing that frontier violence has orphaned the girl for a second time, Kidd resolves to take her to a Union checkpoint and, eventually, to her German relatives across the state. On the way, Kidd must protect his charge, learn to communicate with her, and open his heart to a kind of surrogate fatherhood.
Though a setup of this type typically promises a film that will advance by stringing set pieces together, only one such sequence, a tense and well-filmed shootout on a rocky hillside, turns out to be worth the name. Instead, following a script by Greengrass and poet-screenwriter Luke Davies, Kidd and Johanna mostly ride along uneventfully, occasionally meeting someone whom Kidd knows but just as often sharing a solitary snack or trading vocabulary words in their respective languages. In the past, Hanks has thrived when asked to carry scenes on the strength of his charisma alone. (See, for example, his celebrated turn in Cast Away, which saw him talking, movingly, to a volleyball.) Here, unfortunately, the actor’s work is passable but strangely lifeless, as if an internal fire has dimmed. It is just possible that Hanks is attempting to balance the shrill (and, I’m sorry, obnoxious) performance of his young co-star. The more likely explanation, however, is that Hanks has made a rare error by mistaking dullness for complexity, nullity for nuance.
As for the duo’s stops on the road, they are beset with problems of their own. In a few of these interludes, the point appears to be the delivery of exposition, as when an innkeeper informs the audience that Kidd has a wife in San Antonio. At other times, and to the movie’s detriment, such episodes are intended to evoke contemporary political anxieties. Like 2007’s 3:10 to Yuma, which stumbled over a clumsy Iraq War critique, News of the World is unable to resist a dip in ideological waters. Hence the inclusion, to name just one example, of a scene in which the citizens of an unreconstructed county thrill to the “real” news pronounced by Kidd rather than the propaganda rag put out by their self-appointed leader. Can anyone doubt that Greengrass and company had CNN and Fox News in mind when framing this dichotomy?
So determined is News of the World to put its finger on the scale, in fact, that it occasionally abandons subtlety altogether. One consequence of this blunder is the film’s succession of cartoonish villains, a crew of rapists and racists who seem to possess no interior lives at all. Another is the hagiographic treatment of Captain Kidd, a figure of such unambiguous goodness that he calms a rabid crowd simply by repeating, “We’re all hurting.” (If only the Capitol rioters had been so easily assuaged.) Watching Greengrass’s latest, I couldn’t help thinking about his previous collaboration with Hanks, Captain Phillips, in which a surlier and more interesting protagonist contributed to a near-perfect moviegoing experience. It is unquestionable that both director and star have lost a step since then. Yet their newest effort is undone by its didacticism as much as by any technical flaw.
Perhaps the most disappointing of News of the World’s missteps is its failure to earn its ending, a conclusion that ought to have been joyful but feels labored and predictable instead. Here, as elsewhere, the fault lies with the film’s curious hesitance to place its hero in any moral peril. Because Kidd is virtuous, he brings the movie’s central question to an honorable resolution. Of course he does. Was there ever any doubt that he would?
Staid and respectable, relentless in its messaging, News of the World is the kind of film that liberals watch to confirm their existing points of view. For the rest of us, it’s well worth skipping.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
