News of the World -- "a beautifully old-fashioned Western"

Tom Hanks and Helena Zengel star in this "thoroughly engaging" adventure across Texas, which is "among the most beautiful films of the year," writes Caryn James.

‘Lovely’ is not the first word you'd usually associate with a Western, but it suits ‘News of the World’, a film with tenderness at its core despite its adventures and action. Tom Hanks gives a heartfelt but unsentimental performance as Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a Confederate veteran of the US Civil War. He reluctantly takes a 10-year-old girl across Texas to her aunt and uncle, after she had been captured and raised for six years by a Kiowa tribe that murdered her parents.

The film is set in 1870, as Kidd travels from town to town reading newspapers aloud to groups of people who drop coins in a bucket to hear him. Kidd's public readings feel deliberately rote, as he tells of a sunken ferry or a railroad line about to be extended. Hanks's tamped-down demeanour is less a sign of dullness than of a man who has buried his emotions and is haunted by the past.

The pairing of a Western codger and a young girl evokes John Ford’s 1956 classic, ‘The Searchers’. In that film, John Wayne’s character rescues his niece, who has been kidnapped by Comanches, preparing to reject her because she's no longer a respectable white girl. It also brings to mind ‘True Grit’, the 1969 original and the Coen brothers' witty 2010 version, in which a girl hires a US marshal to find her father's killer. But ‘News of the World’, which straightforwardly embraces the Western genre, is like ‘The Searchers’ without the racist hero, ‘True Grit’ without the wisecracks, and thoroughly engaging in its own right.

'News of the World' is released in cinemas in the US and Canada on 25 December 2020, and internationally on Netflix in 2021.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20201210-news-of-the-world-is-a-beautifully-old-fashioned-western