The “white child raised by natives” narrative has been a staple of the movie Western probably for as long as the movie Western has existed. John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) stands out as the most prominent example. Perhaps the only theme rivaling it for cinematic pervasiveness is the “gruff widower looking for redemption.” That’s who Tom Hanks plays in News of the World, a new film from director Paul Greengrass opening in theaters December 25th (with a Netflix release TBD), an attempt to give us all the iconic Americana of The Searchers with none of the problematic themes or un-PC language.
Like John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, Tom Hanks’s Jefferson Kyle Kidd is a Civil War veteran from the Confederate side, now traversing an occupied Texas beset by banditry, where embittered, impoverished ex-soldiers often prey on the hardscrabble populace, who in turn resent the twitchy Union soldiers they call “the blues” charged with enforcing the peace — all in the midst of an ongoing war between settlers and Native tribes. Unlike Wayne’s Edwards, Kidd seems to have accepted his lot as one of the vanquished, dutifully carrying around his written loyalty oath to the Union and arming himself with only a “scattergun,” a shotgun filled with birdshot.
The only new twist on the genre here is Kidd’s job, which, as referenced in the title, involves him traveling from town to town getting paid a dime a head to read newspapers to the townspeople. A dime seems a little steep; according to CCR, a Willy & the Poor Boys concert down on the corner only cost a nickel to tap your feet. Anyway, Kidd flatters his audience, saying they’re probably too busy working to stay abreast of world events (“Hey, we get it, you can read, you just don’t want to!”) before regaling them with news of mine collapses, railroad company mergers, and the latest proclamations from President Grant, who the crowd inevitably boos and hoots at like a pro wrestling heel.
One day whilst clompety-clomping down the proverbial dusty trail, Captain Kidd (his parents must’ve loved pirates) comes upon an overturned wagon and a freedman hanging from a tree, presumably lynched by restive ex-Rebs. Amidst the wreckage of the wagon he finds a scared little girl, blonde and blue-eyed with conspicuously fake freckles. Seriously, I would read an entire oral history about the decision to give this already-blonde-and-blue-eyed young girl painted-on Mexican sitcom freckles. Were they worried she wouldn’t read white enough? Nonetheless, despite her obvious caucasity, the girl is clad in buckskins and understands no English. She speaks only subtitled Kiowa.
No one else is around, so it seems Kidd is stuck with her. She’s his responsibility, and no one is buying his reluctance about it. His quest is to get her to someone who can take care of her, which will be no mean feat considering she’s already been kidnapped from her white family by Kiowa, torn from her adopted Kiowa family by soldiers, and shorn of her black guardian by some proto-Klansman. Orphan me once, shame on you…
Again, there isn’t much new to the age-old orphaned settler story, though I suppose News Of The World (adapted from the 2016 novel by Paulette Jiles) deserves some credit for covering all the bases of cross-racial kidnapping. Hanks is watchable as always, playing Kidd as an amalgam of Rooster Cogburn, Jimmy Stewart, and Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, your classic American hero who doesn’t start a fight but is willing to finish one, who stands up for the little guy but doesn’t want to make a big thing out of it. He has compelling chemistry with the girl, played by 12-year-old Helena Zengel, the rare competent and tolerable child actor (probably on account of she’s German, and thus didn’t come through the Disney Channel influencer-building machine), who lovably eats chili with her bare hands and tries to start songs during dinner, as she’s been raised.
From there, News Of The World plays out like an obstacle course, with a fleshed out premise and an obvious ending, where most of the narrative energy expended is in contriving barriers to put between the finished setup and expected resolution. Hanks and Zengel weather them all gamely — bandit attacks, dust storms, learning to use a spoon — but Greengrass (director of United 93, Captain Phillips, and the last three Bourne movies) never quite pulls off the sleight of hand necessary to make us momentarily believe in a different outcome. Thus even his most thrilling contrivances still seem slightly tedious and his ending never feels like “the prestige.”
Since almost everything else in it is a tried-and-true trope, the obvious question becomes, why the news-reading angle? At one point, Kidd and the girl get Shanghai’d by an evil ascotted warlord, who tries to force Kidd to read his propaganda rag about what a great job creator he is to the presumably coerced multicultural workforce at the warlord’s buffalo poaching ring (“Jefferson Beauregard Bezos,” I believe the warlord’s name was). Kidd instead regales them with tales of working-class solidarity and nearly starts a revolution (can I get a “hell yeah?”).
The buffalo camp scene is News Of The World‘s most interesting interlude and its clearest hint at a theme, but unfortunately it’s also probably its least well-executed sequence, and thematically, something of a one-off. I would’ve loved to watch Tom Hanks go from town to town inciting labor revolutions with his freckle-faced sidekick, but News Of The World clearly didn’t want to be that movie.
Instead it comes off more like a neoliberal hall of horrors, where the white hero (a reformed Confederate who has seen the error of his ways) triumphs over racists, white nationalists, human traffickers, nature, income inequality, and environmental degradation (the last two as represented by the buffalo camp). Which he does so by reading legacy media to ignorant rural peoples with the assistance of offscreen brown people (okay I exaggerate, the Kiowa did show up once to give him a horse). Grrr, democracy dies in darkness!
Like neoliberalism itself, News Of The World is better than many alternatives, but ultimately disappointing in its lacks for any unifying message, or at least any beyond “don’t be like them.” “Be decent” would’ve been a worthy cause, and perfect for the uncommonly decent Tom Hanks, but News Of The World is a little scattershot and brings with it an implied smugness. America’s Dad literally reads the newspaper to ignorant townsfolk. “But isn’t this fake news?” they ask.
To which he assures them, “No, son, this news is all very real.”
Ah, well, glad we cleared that up.
‘News Of The World’ is in theaters on Christmas Day. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.