Set five years after the Civil War, Hanks plays Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a gray veteran who now makes a living traveling from city to city, entertaining crowds by reading and summarizing newspaper articles highlighting stories from around the world.
Recognizing that your audience lacks the time or ability, think of them as an aggregator of early news, drawn from a rich tradition of storytelling. Kidd presents it as a way to “escape from our troubles,” even though the persistent division and psychic wounds of war, including his own, are very little below the surface.
In the most blatant example, Kidd does his trade in a camp where the business mogul who presides over the site wants him to lie to his audience to keep them more flexible. Think “fake news” only without the digital megaphone.
If this seems a little uncomfortable in the United States as it stands 150 years later, it’s no coincidence. Greengrass (from “United 93” and Jason Bourne’s films, which previously directed Hanks in “Captain Phillips”) has a history of sliding social and political commentary into his films.
However, Kidd is unprepared when he meets Johanna (Helena Zengel), a young orphaned immigrant who has been raised by the Kiowas and only speaks their language. Efforts to enlist the help of the army to find her a house are futile, at which point she is responsible for returning Johanna to her surviving relatives, uncertain how she will be received.
Adapted from Paulette Jiles’ novel, their journey moves at a leisurely pace, along an almost illegal path in which they encounter kindness and cruelty, although the latter is in abundance, including those who would exploit the child for his own purposes.
For fans of the genre, this feeling of old age is a delight. That said, the promotional campaign does no favors to the film, especially for those who associate Greengrass with kinetic action scenes, as with the exception of one or two sequences, those waiting for the adrenaline rush. which would suggest the ads are eligible to be defrauded. .
Overall, “News of the World” is a solid, though unspectacular, film that presents a family story in an interesting historical setting. He simply does not deliver the necessary escape from his problems to a contemporary audience that Kidd promises to his crowds.
“World News” opens on December 25 in certain cinemas. It has the PG-13 classification.