News of the World (2020)

 Score: 4.5 / 5

Every few years or so, there's a brilliant new Western released, and I honestly thought the genre was going to die off years ago. It resurfaces now and again with one that tries to be ironic and postmodern (The Sisters Brothers fails, but The Ballad of Buster Scruggs magnificently succeeds) or one that tries to take the genre in a progressive direction and only marginally succeeds (Woman Walks Ahead and Hostiles). It's not a genre I particularly enjoy anyway, but sometimes you just want to hop on a horse, ride through the dust to a saloon, and drink some whiskey, no? News of the World is my favorite since at least 2016, when Hell or High Water and the remake of The Magnificent Seven were released, and I enjoyed it so much I now feel inspired to go watch more Westerns. It's that powerful.

Captain Jefferson Kidd travels from town to town, reading local, regional, and national news to the toiling masses on the American frontier. Setting up a sort of theatrical space by night in the town center, he charges dimes for people to come and listen to him report happenings in the wider world. As he mentions, his audience is too busy (or illiterate) to read about things happening in the capital or on the borders. His service, though, might be a sort of self-imposed exile, and he seems tormented by something unsaid. The year is 1870, only five years after the Civil War officially ended, though news travels slowly in the wide expanses of the American West. Kidd was a Confederate soldier, and many townspeople in the part of Texas he visits are unhappy with the perceived tyranny of Yankees who patrol the region.

The plot kicks into gear when Kidd comes upon a Black man hanging from a tree, an overturned carriage, and a young white, blonde girl hiding in the wreckage. The girl, whom he guesses is named Johanna, comes from German immigrant descent, but was apparently raised by a tribe of Native Americans. She only speaks Kiowa and doesn't seem to know what's happening to her; Kidd learns from her documents that her tribe has been killed and she was being taken to the authorities. After a few disturbing encounters with those authorities, Kidd takes it upon himself to find the orphan a home. They embark on an adventure from town to town, Kidd on a path to find Johanna's last living relatives in an unstable territory rife with peril. The two begin to bond, despite clear obstacles in their ability to communicate, and learn to help each other in moments of crisis.

The movie stars Tom Hanks as a very different kind of captain than he played in Captain Phillips, his previous venture with director Paul Greengrass. Together, the two play with an old-fashioned Western aesthetic, gritty and dangerous and an almost lack of heart. You can tell it's a Greengrass movie by the way he edits and shoots, but thankfully the cinematography is this time handled by Dariusz Wolski, a personal favorite, who slows down the director's usual frenetic energy with sometimes unbearably long takes -- still handheld, but less nauseating -- that force us into the world they're creating. Add a gently supportive score from James Newton Howard, and you have a movie that never beats you over the head with what it's doing. It comes across as a straightforward story, the kind of yarn travelers out West would spin night after night by campfires after a long day's journey, with little apparent art and a keen sense of entertainment value. Its episodic structure eventually reveals itself as a Homerian device, one that builds until its themes and purpose overwhelm you by the climax.

Sure, some of the episodes are predictable, and I think they are sometimes meant to be. Its plot is certainly not ambitious, but its thematic strength and emotional intelligence are perhaps the most nuanced of any Western I've ever seen. A lot of this is due to Hanks's performance, the actor who in recent years has finally refined his subtlety so much that he is never less than believable, even when the part he plays could so easily fall into rote caricature. The smallest eye twitch, momentary breath, or tilt of the head speaks volumes to his otherwise fairly mysterious character, one who exists by simultaneously entertaining and informing about everything but himself. He can read people as well as he can read papers, yet his piercing eye constantly roves for something more. Of course, by movie's end, we learn exactly what he has been looking for.

I am tempted to call this movie Greengrass's most traditional film in terms of content and style, but that's not a bad thing. In fact, he imbues so much energy and thoughtfulness into this picture that in many ways he revitalized the genre for me. His screenplay, co-written with Luke Davies (Lion, Beautiful Boy), includes a few heavy references to 2020, and I admit to a bit of annoyance with a particular scene when Kidd visits an isolated community ruled by a racist, xenophobic autocrat who tries to force the newsreader to proclaim the propaganda he produces. Of course, the complicated identity of Kidd gives way to humility, integrity, and decency as he tries to help the townspeople, something we can now, finally, recognize in our own political climate. But, like in another recent movie starring Hanks, The Post, this movie reminds us of the strength, danger, and ultimate necessity of a free press, and that is a message we certainly still need to see lionized in major pictures like this.