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
