AMSTERDAM: Tom Hanks as an ageing cowboy searching for his place in a world that is changing too rapidly for him? No, this isn’t “Toy Story 4.” Sadly.
“News of the World” sees Hanks reunite with director Paul Greengrass — the combo behind 2013’s “Captain Phillips.” Here, Hanks plays another captain, Jefferson Kyle Kidd — a veteran of the Confederate army in the US Civil War who now makes a living traveling from town to town reading the news from the latest papers he can find to people who pay 10 cents apiece to hear it. While on the road, he encounters a young German girl by an overturned wagon. She had been kidnapped by Native Americans as an infant and raised as one of their own, but is now being returned to her only surviving relatives by a soldier who has died in their wagon crash.
Kidd ends up, somewhat convolutedly (but essentially because he’s such a good guy), having to transport the girl, Johanna — who barely speaks German or English — to her aunt and uncle himself; a long, dangerous journey made even more dangerous by predators, both human and animal. As they travel, Kidd tries to connect with Johanna, who clearly identifies as Native American and has no desire for a ‘Western’ life.
It’s hard to imagine anyone but Hanks in this role, since his name is now pop-culture shorthand for this type of world-weary, kind, level-headed character. Kidd is all of those things. Hanks plays him perfectly.
Though billed as a Western, this is no action movie. Instead, it’s a contemplation of a divided nation attempting to pull itself together, and of love and responsibility. Johanna’s actual relatives are far less invested in her welfare than Kidd (they’ve never met before and she is borderline-feral, after all).
The success of the film rides on the chemistry between Helena Zengel as Johanna and Hanks as her guardian. I wasn’t entirely convinced — in comparison, to say, the similar couple in the Coen brothers’ 2010 take on “True Grit.”
“News of the World” is a sweet, downbeat-but-optimistic movie, and certainly not bad. But it is more notable, ultimately, for the films that it isn’t, rather than the film it is.
