News of the World

I was sold on checking this out on the idea of Tom Hanks in a western. While it isn’t what it sounds like, what it turned out to be is quite good, if predictable. Hanks plays a southern Civil War vet who travels from town to town reading the news of the world. He ends up in the custody of a girl who was kidnapped as a child by an Indian tribe and raised as one of them, and only speaks the language of her abductors. She has papers to be taken to her remaining family’s home, and he ends up stuck with the duty. It’s not a terribly original plot. Two people from different worlds, stuck on a trip together and bonding. It’s True Grit, it’s Planes Trains & Automobiles, it’s most road trip movies. But sometimes, you don’t need originality when the crucial elements are done well, and News does them all pretty damned good. This isn’t a slam-bang, rootin-tootin, guns-blazing western. In fact, the western setting is mostly just that — a setting. It plays into the plot, of course, as the movie takes place during Reconstruction, and the travails of the old west are there. But this is about the journey, and the discovery both of these broken souls find in each other. It’s sentimental, it’s sappy, and it’s obvious as a train in a tunnel, but the atmosphere and slow burn and variety of hurdles they encounter all come together. At the center of it are two great performances. If I need to sell you on Tom Hanks, I don’t even know what to say. The girl. Helena Zengel, is excellent. She conveys the anger and confusion and longing for a home she no longer has, and over time, strength and resilience and understanding. She’s beyond her years, and has a hell of a future ahead of her. And the direction is lovely. Simple but elegant, using the wide open plains of Texas as a character in and of itself. The slow burn and casual pace of the movie may not be to everybody’s liking. Westerns usually are exciting or gritty; this is neither. It’s a road trip and a character study. But it does both of these well and the result is a charming, soulful movie that wears its on heart on its sleeve. It may broadcast its intentions, but the ending is exactly what you want. Sometimes it’s okay to know where a movie is going, if that’s where it should go.