It was around this time last year that I was sitting in the cinema with a Tom Hanks movie in front of me; A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood. And here I am again, for News of the World. I missed out on Greyhound last year, also staring Hanks, but a Golden Globe nomination for young Helena Zengel in a supporting role, has led me to sniff this one out, even if I had to travel cross-country through my nearest city to find a cinema showing it. (Edit: this is a Netflix movie, but I didn’t realise, and I sought it out in a cinema showing an early release. A rookie mistake, and not too thrifty. How silly of me!). Anyway, let’s talk about the movie – News of the World is directed by Paul Greengrass, and features Tom Hanks as Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd; a nineteenth century newsman, who travels from town to town to read the news to local folk who, I guess, can’t read for themselves or don’t have early access to newspapers. Captain comes across an uncivilised settler girl, Johanna (Helena Zengel), raised by Indians after her parents passed, and attacked now on the road to her new home. Exhausting his options, Captain engages his own morality, and takes it upon himself to drive the treacherous trail required to see Johanna put where she needs to be. Together, they navigate a language barrier and the underbelly of the south.
I always try to connect the dots when it comes to a movie’s themes, and what the movie is trying to say, with the movie’s decision on its title acting as the guiding star. For a long while along the movie’s stretch, I found News of the World always interesting, but relatively pointless. My astute companion, who I saw the movie alongside, pointed out that scenes where Captain is recounting the news, are few and far between, and this movie seems more focused on Captain and Johanna’s journey across country – there’s a tad of Green Book about it actually, where two people of differing cultures must find common ground. But I do think the overall point of News of the World is that Captain is a newsman; he’s like a newsreader and a politician in one actually – at one point, Captain senses trouble when retelling tales of ‘federal orders to accept constitutional amendments’, and compassionately soothes the tension in a room of locals before a riot can break loose. But it’s not until the final scene that brought the movie together for me – it’s a scene of showmanship and levity, where Captain is recounting a quirky tale that derives from a living in a community. You know that saying, ‘truth is stranger than fiction?’ We forget (I know I forget) that it can be a fun statement, and not always a wry sobering one. I’ll get dark talking about this too much, but it makes me sad – our news has been swallowed by corporation media and spit out sick, where the news is serious business; it’s too important to be treated with anything less than honesty and compassion, and its a good man like Captain who understands, and can do it; a trusted go-between bureaucracy and society’s citizens. I’ll give a personal real-world example; I remember Stephen Colbert from The Late Show on the night that Trump won the 2016 election – an adamant Trump anti-supporter himself, he gave a calming speech to a shocked audience, and a wider globe, that only weeks prior saw the idea of President Trump as unfathomable. He took disturbing news, and processed it to ease the burden. He accounted for the fear, and didn’t aim to exacerbate it. I’ll always respect him for that. Now, four years later, and the US has another election under their belt, I can’t find the clip of Colbert’s speech to watch anywhere, blocked from YouTube and other video sites when I was hoping to revisit it whilst writing this, but I remember compassionate and honest words to a shocked and disappointed nation… Then Colbert spent the next four years bagging the President every night – ah well, he is a comedian too after all, and it’s not like the former President wasn’t ripe with low-hanging fruit.
Let’s talk about language barriers in movies – News of the World is telling Johanna’s side of the story through subtitles, as well as giving us Captain’s first-hand perspective. If we were Captain, really in the situations before us, we wouldn’t know what Johanna was on about half the time. The early scene for example, when Johanna is shouting across the flooding river to the passing tribe, we know that Johanna is yelling for her people to not leave her behind because we are told so through subtitles, where Captain would be guessing, deducing, second-guessing and assuming what is really going on, often through a bias gaze of his cultural norms. It’s important to note, how easy it is to not be ignorant when you’re given the information, is all I’m trying to say. It’s no different to when Johanna believes a spoon is absurd, because she has always eaten with her hands, although a spoon would save her getting sticky fingers and/or wasting food. When Captain asks for Johanna’s name and she says something else, the newsman says he doesn’t understand her language; I would have assumed that was her name initially, like Tarzan and ‘Ohisee’ in Disney’s Tarzan – no reason to assume otherwise initially without follow-up. Personally, I’m still waiting for a movie to present a realistic real-world way to navigate language and cultural barriers practically, if any do exist.
I like this movie (at most, due to my personal conclusions about it), although I think it’s also choppy in parts. Captain and Johanna jump from scenarios, encountering new acquaintances along the way; some of them I dug, others I did not. For instance, Farley’s (Thomas Francis Murphy) town of hate was a little contrived, making the point that a single voice can urge the masses to stand up to tyrannical control… but are they really going to do it because they prefer to hear a coal mining story? Then again, Rosa Parks did refuse to give up her seat on the bus, and the littlest things can spark revolution, so point taken. Conversely, the shoot-out between Captain and three marauders is the most exciting, and well-thought-out sequence of the movie – Greengrass must have been warning the crew that he had ‘Jason Bourne’ in his back-pocket, so shooting a stand-off in a movie like News of the World should be child’s play; talk about pressure, but the proof is in the pudding.
As my movie-going companion pointed out to me in his own way – play a cowboy doll long enough in Toy Story, and you’ll see yourself become a cowboy. Talk to a volleyball long enough in Castaway, and you’ll live to see that volleyball turn into a young girl with her own backstory and culture. The soothing and forever-new granddaddy of cinema, Mr. Tom Hanks, is still the reason to see this film, where even in the wild south, he can find a way to be a thoughtful out-and-out gentleman; bless him. News of the World goes to show that chaotic and volatile conditions have always been the norm; as Bill Camp’s cameo as Captain’s old friend near the end says, we just find our way in it. Travelling across the land with his ward, we, along with the Captain and Johanna, encounter some first-hand horrors; extortion, greed, theft, murder, tyranny, that are just as relevantly depicted now as back before. Like Captain and Johanna, the goal continues to be to consolidate the past to find the place forward – simples!
3.5
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