Monthly Archives: February 2021

  • News of the World

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Paul Greengrass (2020)

    Paul Greengrass is British so he’ll know that compatriots seeing the title of his new film need to make a swift cultural adjustment:  News of the World is not a biopic of the late, unlamented Sunday red top.  The story, adapted by Luke Davies (Lion, Beautiful Boy) from Paulette Jiles’ 2016 novel of the same name, is set largely in Texas, a few years after the end of the Civil War.  Greengrass’s protagonist, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks), is a former  Confederate infantryman who now makes a living as a peripatetic ‘newscaster’.  Travelling on horseback from town to town, he reads out recent stories, from a variety of newspapers, to public gatherings.  Each audience member pays ten cents on the door to hear ‘the news of the world’.

    On the way from one reading engagement to the next, Kidd comes upon an overturned wagon on the road.  He ventures into adjacent woodland to investigate and finds the corpse of an African-American soldier hanging from a tree; the white racist sentiments of a handmade notice alongside explain the lynching.  Hiding nearby is a young white girl (Helena Zengel), dressed in Native American clothes.  After trying unsuccessfully to escape him, the child seems warily to accept that Kidd means her no harm.  This is Johanna Leonberger, a ten-year-old orphan whose parents died in a Kiowa raid on the hill country where they’d set up home after leaving their German immigrant community in Castroville, near San Antonio.  After spending the last six years living as a member of the Kiowa, Johanna had recently been returned to a North Texas settlement from where she was being driven, by the soldier who ended strung up on the tree, to rejoin surviving relatives in Castroville.

    Kidd pieces this picture together from paperwork Johanna is carrying and conversation with Union officials in a town further up the road, rather than through the child herself.  She speaks the Kiowa language rather than German or English; she calls herself by the tribal name she was given.  A representative of the Bureau of Indian Affairs won’t be available to take charge of matters for three months; Kidd arranges for Johanna to stay in the meantime with one of his former infantry colleague (Ray McKinnon) and his wife (Mare Winningham) but the girl tries to escape.  Kidd has no children of his own and, he says, lacks the patience needed to be a parent (though no evidence is shown to support this at any stage).  He reluctantly decides to escort Johanna to her aunt and uncle’s home.  Kidd’s a native of the area himself.  His wife is still in San Antonio.

    The two main characters are an engaging partnership.  The storytelling is clear.  As you’d expect in a Paul Greengrass film, there’s high-quality editing, by William Goldenberg.  Dariusz Wolski’s cinematography does justice to the vast, dusty landscapes, burnishing the terrain without sentimentalising it.  James Newton Howard’s score is pleasantly non-intrusive.  But none of this lifts the narrative out of over-familiarity and News of the World, although easily watchable, doesn’t seem to be about much.  This is essentially a Western road movie.  The principals, en route to their shared home-and-family destination, survive perilous confrontations with Confederate-soldiers-turned-criminals, who want to buy the child and sell her on for a profit, and a vicious band in Erath County, committed to purging the territory of outsiders.  Kidd and Johanna suffer other setbacks such as a wheel coming off their wagon and the loss of their horse.  The portrayal of Texan nativists is emphatic enough for the film to tick the raises-serious-issues-that-are-just-as-relevant-today box but there’s a rote feel to all these episodes.

    The encounters with baddies are also fairly protracted, not always credibly so.   At a news-reading, Kidd incurs the wrath of Farley (Thomas Francis Murphy), the nativists’ ringleader, by daring to quote from newspapers other than the Erath County local rag.  He compounds the offence by, despite Farley’s objections, getting the audience on his side.  I didn’t believe Kidd would insist on doing this and thereby jeopardise the safety of his young charge, unprotected at the gathering.  That said, it’s predictable that Johanna, thanks to her tough early years, proves precociously resourceful in a crisis and, indeed, a crack shot.  She more than once saves Kidd’s skin.  In one sequence, as they drive along, Johanna speaks the Kiowa names for the flora and fauna around them, and the sky; to hear these Native American words spoken by the child of continental European immigrants to America has an almost mysterious charge.  The ex-Confederate soldiers’ bitterness that they and their like were poor men ‘fighting a rich man’s war’ registers, too.  These are strong details, and not the only ones in the film, but details are all they are.

    The capable supporting cast includes, in addition to Ray McKinnon and Mare Winningham, Bill Camp and Elizabeth Marvel but News of the World is, to all intents and purposes, a two-hander. Helena Zengel, eleven years old at the time, has already done plenty of film work in her native Germany, including playing the lead in the internationally well-received System Crasher.  As Johanna, she seems both instinctive and assured.  Zengel has now also had the benefit of working with a master screen actor.  In his previous collaboration with Paul Greengrass, Tom Hanks, as a very different captain, gave one of his most compelling performances:  the title character in Captain Phillips (2013), despite his considerable courage, was a chilly human being.  The quietly determined but sympathetic Kidd is a much more obvious role for him but Hanks is still a treat to watch.  His hero is not only thoroughly decent but wholly lacking in sanctimony.  Hanks is extraordinarily alert to the camera without ever appearing overly aware of it.  Nothing he does seems either too much or too little.

    It’s mentioned that Kidd used to be a printer before the Civil War.  That chimes amusingly with Hanks’ own interest in typeface (Uncommon Type, his book of short stories inspired by his typewriter collection, was published in 2017) but – as the child’s utterance of Kiowa words for plants and animals, as well as Kidd’s post-war line of work, makes clear – spoken language matters just as much in the narrative.  Kidd tries to make conversation with Johanna in English even though he’s been told she doesn’t speak it.  As he talks to the girl, he himself seems to be hearing English words from her point of view, savouring their strangeness.  Tom Hanks does this beautifully.

    Although in several respects an old-fashioned film, News of the World isn’t able to deliver a traditional no-place-like-home finale.  Kidd safely delivers Johanna to her aunt and uncle (Winsome Brown and Neil Sandilands) but it’s no place for the child, who feels a stranger and is unwanted there.  Although Greengrass delays until this point confirmation that Kidd’s wife dwelling place in San Antonio is a graveyard, it was clear from the film’s very first scene that she was dead, thanks to the eloquence of Hanks’ face as Kidd looked at a photograph of his wife.  The failure of the twin homecomings ensures that there is a rousing outcome to the story, after all, as Kidd rides back to Castroville and rescues Johanna from her unlovely relatives.

    What sounds like a mechanical happy ending allows for an effective and enjoyable final scene – a reading by Kidd, with Johanna beside him on stage, helping with sound effects.   At the end of the performance, he introduces her as Johanna Kidd, and she takes a bow.  It’s a pity Greengrass hasn’t done more to portray the news-reading light-heartedly, as a form of entertainment as well as a means to enlightenment.  But no matter – this exception is worth waiting for.  It gives us a glimpse of Tom Hanks’ natural humour.  It suggests, in Johanna’s beaming face as she laps up the audience applause, this may be a quality shared by Helena Zengel.

    12 February 2021

  • Casting JonBenet

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Kitty Green (2017)

    Before The Assistant (2019), her dramatic feature debut, Kitty Green made three documentaries, culminating in this one.  How you receive Casting JonBenet depends on, inter alia, how much you know in advance about the murder of six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey, in Boulder, Colorado on Christmas night 1996.  The case has become an enduring international cause célèbre – enduring largely because the murder officially remains unsolved – and Green, who is Australian, assumes prior knowledge of the essential details.  Either I never knew or I’d forgotten most of them.  I was aware the victim was a child beauty queen:  I carried an image in my head of a doll-like figure in a huge blonde wig and glittery pageant costume.  I had the idea that a bogus abduction and ransom demand were involved, and that no one had been convicted of the killing.  But that’s about all.  I gleaned what else I now know about the case – including theories about who killed the little girl – from Green’s numerous talking heads.

    Casting JonBenet is a nifty idea.  Green conducts auditions for roles in a reconstruction of the events of Christmas 1996.  The people auditioning are also invited to talk about JonBenét’s murder and about themselves.  They’re a motley crew of professional and non-professional actors, variously employed.  Thanks to a combination of menacing aspect and the nature of his part-time work, one of the least forgettable is a self-described ‘sex educator’, who attempts to demonstrate to the camera how to use a flogging whip (comically, and fortunately, without anyone on the receiving end).  What unites these people is that they all live in or around Boulder.  In other words, as well as serving an ulterior motive in relation to the proposed reenactment, they’re a means of illustrating the diverse memories and myths about the murder that have built up in the local community.

    These aspiring cast members assert the guilt or innocence of family members who’ve been suspected of killing JonBenét – her mother Patsy, father John, elder brother Burke – and discuss the possibility that the culprit was an intruder in the family home.  They opine on the authorship of the ludicrously lengthy ransom ‘note’ police found on the premises (it ran to several pages) and rumours about the Ramsey parents’ involvement in a paedophile ring.   Some interviewees have their own barmy theories.  One woman claims a sixth sense about the crime in more ways than one:  she sees it as significant that JonBenét died at the age of six, in 1996, perhaps in the early  hours of December 26th (sic!)  Others relate what happened to their own traumatic experiences of the death of a child, the murder of a sibling, a cancer diagnosis.  (Patsy Ramsey overcame cancer years before, and died of the disease a decade after, her daughter’s murder.)

    For this viewer, eager to know more about the case and fascinated by acting, the documentary’s first half is intriguing – enough to subdue, if not expel, suspicion that this is at heart an exploitation film.  You naturally start assessing the potential actors.  One young boy is vividly, naturally eccentric as he describes to the interviewer (never seen or heard) a day he spent auditioning for a mattress commercial:  I was glad to see him briefly turn up as Burke Ramsey in a later scene.  The layers of pretence involved in the spectacle of would-be JonBenéts – made up and bewigged, in gruesome pageant uniform – are queasy but compelling.  An actor called Dixon White is memorably creepy reading for the role of John Mark Karr, who falsely confessed to the murder years after it was committed.  But, by the time another actor explains his soul-searching before deciding to audition for John Ramsey, the benefit of the doubt has worn very thin.  By the end of Casting JonBenet, you feel that Kitty Green has been doubly exploitative – of a murdered child and her family, and of some of the living people she’s put on camera, albeit they had a choice in the matter denied to the Ramseys.

    As in Robert Greene’s nearly contemporary Kate Plays Christine (2016), the proposed dramatisation of real-life events that is the film’s launch pad gradually recedes from prominence.  A difference lies in the extent of clear complicity between the film-maker and the actor(s) involved.  In Kate Plays Christine you come to see that Kate Lyn Sheil, who is researching the life of the late TV news journalist Christine Chubbuck in preparation for playing her, knows what Greene has in mind.  In Casting JonBenet you increasingly wonder quite how the director sold the project to prospective participants.  Did Kitty Green give them an idea of what, if anything, her narrative of the crime would suggest actually happened?  Were they told in advance that the reconstruction for which they were auditioning would comprise only a minor part, in terms of both screen time and impact, of the eventual film?   What few reconstruction scenes there are amount to incidents peripheral to the murder.   That pleasant middle-aged man who searched his conscience before going for the part of John Ramsey says he decided that, by getting involved, he ‘might actually do some good’.  It’s impossible to see from the end result what he thought that good might be.

    Although this is obscured for a while by one’s interest in finding out key facts of the case and in the auditions, Kitty Green, from an early stage, does little to conceal her sly, stylish priorities.  The women in the running for Patsy Ramsey are all dressed in red, except for one in blue; the latter, also uniquely, wears the pearl necklace that, she explains, was the original’s hallmark accoutrement.  (This woman does resemble several of the others, though, in looking too old for Patsy, who had her fortieth birthday a few days after JonBenét’s death.  John Ramsey, who is still alive, was thirteen years his wife’s senior.)  JonBenét Ramsey was strangled to death after being bashed on the head.  Green reaches her antic point of no return with an insert that follows discussion among her interviewees as to whether nine-year-old Burke would have been physically capable of inflicting on his sister the cranial damage she suffered.  By way of analogy, Green shows a succession of small boys, in goggles and rainwear, who use a torch to try and smash open a watermelon.  The last of these kids, when he succeeds in doing so, instinctively eats a bit of the fruit – a detail whose charm doesn’t come close to reducing the ugliness of the sequence’s conception.  In the finale to Casting JonBenet red-clad Patsys swarm onto a constructed set of the Ramsey home.  The composition is nothing if not visually rhythmical, tonally striking.  As such, and as Kitty Green’s film as a whole turns out to be, it’s also morally bankrupt.

    7 February 2021

Posts navigation