I love certain kinds of westerns, usually ones starring Clint Eastwood and/or directed by an Italian because you can always rely on the Italians to transform a mundane genre into an orgy of graphic violence. Unfortunately, News of the World does not come from that school of western thought. No, News of the World comes from the Dances with Wolves western tradition of taking solid performances and cinematography and trapping them in a gauntlet of white guilt clichés and boredom that seems to stretch on as long as the sea. I’ve seen worse, but holy shit did I check my watch a lot during this movie.
Tom Hanks plays Captain Kidd, who is a retired army captain and not a superhero’s kid sidekick as I had hoped from the name. Kidd goes from town-to-town reading newspapers aloud for illiterate townsfolk as a sort of theater experience, and I think that Hanks actually reading the New York Times aloud for two hours could be more entertaining than the movie. Anyway, Kidd stumbles into Johanna (played by Helena Zengel), a little girl that was kidnapped by Native Americans after they murdered her whole family. She then lived with the tribe growing up and became accustomed to their ways, forgetting her American/German heritage and family (I like to think that this is a younger version of Mary McDonnell’s character from Dances with Wolves, thus creating a Marvel-style interconnected universe of pretentious westerns). Kidd is tasked with returning her to her surviving aunt and uncle and the rest of the film is a road trip movie.
Considering the name of the film and the odd specificity of Kidd’s profession (did people really do this?), it’s amazing how little the whole news-reading thing plays into the plot. It really has nothing to do with anything in the main plot and could easily have been written out of the film. I’m baffled that the writers would give the main character such a unique, albeit stupid, profession and then do nothing with it. If you are going into this film hoping that your love of newspapers being read out loud would finally achieve mainstream validation, then keep on walking, you weird, sad bastard.
So we are left with a road trip movie. Now, I actually love road trip movies but I usually love them as comedies (such as Smokey & the Bandit, Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Kingpin). This movie reminded me of a lesson that I learned from 2017’s similarly mind-numbing western Hostiles: Road trip movies are really fucking boring when the movie takes itself way too seriously, takes forever to get anywhere and lacks any central villains. Road trip movies are inherently episodic, which can work when the episodes are entertaining, but this largely amounts to our main characters coming to a town, meeting some racist white villains, escaping and moving on to the next town. It gets old really damn fast. It also doesn’t help that the film is predictable as all hell with a final twist that is not only infuriatingly obvious at the half-way point, but is also ripped right out of Planes, Trains & Automobiles. Considering how serious this film is, it’s not good that the twist was done with greater emotional impact in a comedy.
Tom Hanks gives a great performance, even with little to work with in the character department, but that’s like saying that my Taco Bell dinner was delicious. Of course it was delicious, it’s goddamn Taco Bell. Of course his performance is good, he’s Tom freaking Hanks. I feel like I can take a quality performance from him for granted at this point. Helena Zengel’s performance is being called a “revelation” by critics, which is critic-speak for a great major film debut (this isn’t her first movie, but I think it’s her first movie in English). I have to go with the critics here because she is excellent. Since her character can’t speak English, her performance is mostly done through facial expressions and strategic silences and she conveys more in those silences than most child actors can with a Shakespearian soliloquy to perform. Although I never plan to watch this movie again, I look forward to watching her career develop from here.
News of the World is boring enough to get Oscar consideration, so be warned. Strong performances can’t conceal the fact that this is a meandering, tedious, dreary film that simultaneously sucks all of the fun out of both westerns and road trip movies. If you like Dances with Wolves, then you may enjoy this. For me, I would rather watch The Wild Bunch for the twentieth time.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_of_the_World_(film)#/media/File:News_of_the_World_film_poster.png
