News of the World, a western with Tom Hanks

World news could be set in post-Civil War Texas, but it starts with the mention of a meningitis outbreak and ends with the mention of a cholera outbreak – a subtle (or perhaps not-so-subtle) reminder from the director Paul Greengrass that even when he’s making fixed-point movies in the past, they ultimately relate to the way things are now. Based on the excellent novel by Paulette Jiles in 2016, World news follows Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks), a former Confederate Army captain, as he attempts to transport Johanna (Helena Zengel), a 10-year-old Kiowa-raised German girl, to what remains of her family. In another era – when the Western genre was a vessel for all sorts of myths about white colonization and civilization – the movie could have been about the return of a lost and savage soul from the comfort of a imaginary community. World news has the elegiac vibe and epic look of a classic western, but its take on civilization is much more complicated. No place in this movie is like home, neither for Kidd nor for Johanna. The stages of their journey seem more and more suffocating, empty, violent, hellish. These two are both practical and spiritual nomads.

Kidd’s job is to go from city to city reading newspapers around the world to the public. He mixes snippets of current affairs with evocative tales of distant lands, half-interpreting his tales to arouse the interest of the crowd. In his novel, Jiles makes it clear that this dead end job is all this old printer could get. The film version of Kidd invests him with a little more nobility and power: he understands the effect his stories can have on his audience, and as the film progresses, he learns to wield that power more precisely. Its accounts speak of mysterious events, wonderful inventions, political events – and they all serve to open up the world and maybe even place the listener in it somewhere. As Kidd reads and his audience responds, we feel like we are watching the start of something strange, new, and dreadful: the beginnings of a connected, self-aware society.

Kidd and Johanna, like many characters in Greengrass, straddle different tribes in a time of enormous change. He’s a defeated and reluctant soldier from an army that no longer exists, with bad memories of a horrific war, but he also loads his stories with a sense of wonder and optimism that feels genuine. Hanks brings his usual affability and understated authority to the role, but he also brings weariness and melancholy: World news looks like the first real Old Man Tom Hanks movie, and it’s the most touching it has been in years. (I would say this is his best job since his last collaboration with Greengrass, Captain Phillips.) Johanna, meanwhile, was torn from two different families – a German, a Kiowa – just as she is supposed to develop her identity. The film’s most heartbreaking moment finds her by a river, standing on a cliff in the pouring rain, crying and begging that a migrating Native American tribe half-visible through the water to bring her back to her Kiowa family.

Meanwhile, all around our two rootless protagonists stretches the failing state of Texas, which Greengrass photographs with the wide-eyed immersion he brought in previous films about the torn-apart Northern Ireland. war and after the American invasion of Baghdad. It is a land alternating between vast spaces and crowded cities bubbling with divisions and threats, broken places filled with broken people. But this time around, the director chooses to forgo the messy, wearable aesthetic of the “shaky-cam” that has started to become a punchline in some of his films. World news is hauntingly beautiful, with views you can lose yourself in and a James Newton Howard score that vibrates and shakes and sweeps. It’s strange to see a Westerner in 2020 who actually dares to be a Westerner, especially coming from a director who has specialized for so long in urgent, high-tech, and headline-ripping thrillers. But it might not be such a strange combination. World news has the attributes of an old-fashioned epic, but it also has a restless, modern soul.

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