Butler's Cinema Scene

Helena Zengel, Tom Hanks

“NEWS OF THE WORLD” My rating: B+ (Theaters Christmas Day)

118 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Not merely a celebration of our mythic past, Westerns have usually been a way of looking ahead.

The frontier, settlements, Western expansion, laying rails, driving cattle, overcoming obstacles (be it the weather, Native Americans or outlaws)…these are elements of an inherently optimistic outlook, of a nation on the march.

“News of the World,” though, is that rarest of creatures, the melancholy Western.

While sporting many of the elements of classical oaters (especially John Ford’s “The Searchers”), Paul Greengrass’ effort  is more about loss than a triumphant taming of the wilderness. It is far more concerned with the ache of human suffering and a society in turmoil than in gunplay.

Tom Hanks stars as Jefferson Kidd, a former printer and Confederate officer now living off the back of a horse as he circulates among  Texas towns  to bring his fellow citizens the latest news of 1870.

He’s something of a showman, sporting a black frock coat and spectacles to pore over a stack of recent newspapers, delivering quietly dramatic reports of droughts and floods, plagues and politics.  He’s always on the lookout for human interest stories that connect his listeners to the larger world and its inhabitants (“These are men and women very much like you”). Think of him as a wandering town crier with humanistic tendencies.

It’s a solitary life, at least until he comes across a looted wagon and a hanged man.  Nearby Kidd discovers a white girl (Helena Zengel) — blonde hair, blue eyes, freckles — wearing a fringed buckskin dress.

She speaks no English: papers found nearby identify her as Johanna, who lost her family to a Kiowa war party six years earlier. The kidnapped girl was only recently liberated by soldiers who eradicated her adopted clan. (Orphaned twice, Kidd notes.) The hanged man, her government escort, was a Negro. A handwritten sign on his body announces that blacks are not welcome in the neighborhood.

The only decent thing to do, Kidd concludes, is to bring the girl to an Indian agent who can get her to an aunt and uncle living in south Texas. Of course, government ineptness and the tenor of the times — Indians are hated and feared by the general population — make this a difficult proposition. And so, for the time being, Kidd and the kid become traveling companions (the film was shot in New Mexico and is beautiful without romanticizing the environment).

Greengrass and co-writer Luke Davies (adapting Paulette Jiles’ novel) devote the lion’s share of their screenplay to the slow-growing bond between Kidd and his young charge as they move from one episode to the next.  It’s a relationship based not on language but on gesture, and it is one of the triumphs of Tom Hanks’ screen persona that he can project compassion and concern, humor and horror with little or no dialogue.

He’s perfectly matched by young miss Zengel, a German actress who effortlessly inhabits the form of this stubborn, resourceful but undeniably damaged child. Their scenes together are astoundingly right.

Greengrass, of course, is a Brit whose work has been divided between the Bourne franchise and gritty docudramas like “Bloody Sunday,” “United 93” and “Captain Phillips” (starring Hanks); the latter films often have political underpinnings. Here he views post-Civil War Texas as a substitute for our own troubled times.

Ignorance and racism are the order of the day. Federal troops are seen as oppressors. Citizens may not carry handguns. Rumors circulate far more rapidly than facts.

Kidd and Johanna find plenty of trouble along the way.  Some is provided by Mother Nature — a huge dust storm, vast stretches of territory with no water, a landscape that seems to have been devised to kill horses.

There are two-legged dangers as well. The pair are pursued by a trio of creeps (the lead scumbag is played by Michael Angelo Covino) with child rape on their minds.  Later Kidd finds himself held in a feudal society run by a tinpot dictator (Thomas Francis Murphy) bent on wiping out the buffalo.

Yet all this is merely a backdrop to the film’s real concern, the opening up of two hearts that have been all but shut down by tragedy and suffering. It’s also about communication, about transcending the limitations of language.

Granted, these are not your usual Western tropes. But “News of the World” has a sneaky way of wrapping around your shoulders like an Indian blanket; both are a way of keeping the cold at bay.

| Robert W. Butler