News of the World review – Tom Hanks fights fake news in the wild west Mark Kermode Observer film critic
“I ain’t never heard of newsreading as a business before.” So says a wide-eyed Fred Hechinger in writer-director Paul Greengrass’s visually expansive yet oddly intimate adaptation of Paulette Jiles’s 2016 novel – a hybrid western that comes on like
The Searchers or
True Grit bizarrely crossed with
Broadcast News. The setting might be post-civil war north Texas, but there’s no mistaking the modern-day parallels as Tom Hanks travels the land, dramatically reading down-to-earth stories from a selection of newspapers and journals.
Director
Paul Greengrass
Starring
Tom Hanks, Helena Zengel, Elizabeth Marvel, Michael Angelo Covino, Neil Sandilands, Winsome Brown, Bill Camp
Tom Hanks plays another decent man in a bad, bad world in a cast iron western that is essentially
The Searchers in reverse
Surprisingly, given the scope of his CV and his many everyman roles, this is Tom Hanks first full western (sorry, folks, Sherriff Woody in
Toy Story doesn t quite count).
Here is the ever reliable and ever watchable Hanks burnishing his credentials as a modern-day Jimmy Stewart, playing yet another honest man in a bad, bad world.
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Captain Phillips director Paul Greengrass, with Greengrass and co-writer Luke Davies (
Lion) adapting Paulette Jiles best-selling book of the same name for the screen.
Helena Zengel as Johanna and Tom Hanks as Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd in News of the World
Saddling up for the journey ahead, Netflix says: Set five years after the end of the American Civil War, Hanks plays Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a veteran of three wars who moves from town to town as a non-fiction storyteller, sharing the news of presidents and queens, glorious feuds, devastating catastrophes, and gripping adventures from the far reaches of the globe.
To understand the present, one must understand the past. To understand the past, one must understand what was different there, and that s the path to understanding the connections. So when you see Captain Jefferson Kidd (Hanks) reading extracts from the daily papers in candlelit rooms to residents of towns and cities in post-Civil War Texas, it seems alien. At the same time, he has the gravitas of an evening news anchor. He s somewhere between a respected man of letters and a traveling sideshow act, and he s fully aware of his tenuous situation in life. It s not a rich man s occupation, he explains, which is why he finds himself in the unexpected position of taking a lost child to her family.