NEWS OF THE WORLD | FILM REVIEW
Dir: Paul Greengrass (12A, 127 mins)
Tom Hanks goes to the Wild West under the direction of Paul Greengrass, the pair having previously got together in Captain Phillips. This is stately Sunday afternoon classiness, however, rather than intense shakycam action. Hanks plays Captain Kidd, a veteran of the American Civil War who in the still-turbulent 1870s goes from town to town reading out the facts – the news from around the globe, to those who want to hear it. Yet some only want their own truths to be heard, whilst others revel in the tales of foreign climes and workers fighting back against their oppressors.
On his travels Kidd encounters Johanna – a 10-year-old girl, played excellently by System Crasher’s Helena Zengel. Originally German, Johanna was taken in by the Kiowa Native American tribe and raised as their own; now that the Kiowa have been dispossessed of their land, she has been ordered to return to her biological aunt and uncle, a job that Hanks reluctantly takes on. Along the way, they battle would-be slavers out to snatch the young girl for their own nefarious ends, buffalo-slaughtering Trump-esque local dictators, duststorms and the Kiowa themselves.
Hanks, as ever, is superb as the conflicted Kidd – haunted by his past and the woman he left behind, but who gradually takes the fiery Johanna under his wing. There are some tense set pieces, a shootout in a canyon, a walk into a hellish town gone wild and the relaying of news and its effect on the listener. This chimes especially with this era’s Trumpian fake news campaigns, and the tendency of people to believe only what they are told.
News Of The World, an unfortunate title thanks to the tabloid rag that it conjures to mind in the UK, is raised higher in stature thanks to this backdrop, along with a critique of the forceable displacement of Native Americans and the intolerance of the ignorant. Leisurely paced and full of grand vistas of the West, with a strong central relationship that engrosses: a western with a brain and a heart.
Streaming on Netflix from Wed 10 Feb
words KEIRON SELF