News of the World

 

British movie director Paul Greengrass is a master of the set piece, a fairly self-contained, highly charged narrative moment that lets virtuosic filmmakers strut their stuff. Greengrass may be best known to many for taking over the directing of the Jason Bourne franchise after the initial Bourne Identity. Both Bourne Supremacy and Bourne Ultimatum featured intricately choreographed scenes of pursuit in vehicles and on foot and close quarters hand-to-hand combat.

Greengrass's latest film, News of the World, is set in 1870 Texas and so does not have the thrilling complexity of the Bournes or the international intrigue of the 2013 Tom Hanks vehicle Captain Phillips -- but it does deliver the menace of a forbidding landscape as the backdrop for skirmish and slaughter by bitter, defeated hordes, chafing under the bridle of Yankee occupation.

In News, Hanks plays a former Confederate army officer, Captain Jeff Kidd, who travels the Texas badlands reading newspapers to townsfolks for a dime. In a sense, he's taken this as a calling, and Greengrass films the readings as if they were revivals. And that fits because before the war, Kidd was a minister and newspaper publisher (yes, an ironic combination when viewed through contemporary lenses). He answered the call and left his home and wife in San Antonio for the war but never returned. His agitation, palsy and itinerancy suggest lingering post war trauma.

The film's arc, which is neither sparkling nor cliche, has the Captain discovering the wreckage of a wagon and the body of a Black man hanging from a tree, a supremacist message tacked to his chest. The young white girl he was escorting to safety is hiding in the brush. She'd been rescued from a tribe that had killed her family six years before and raised her as a Kiowa. The Captain is charged with her safe delivery to her family, hundreds of miles away.

The young German actress Helena Zengel plays Cicada / Johanna, a fairly demanding role for a child, which has won her a Golden Globe supporting role nomination. The story evolves as one might expect, with Greengrass staging two especially intense sequences -- one in a canyon as the Captain tries to hold off three men who traffic in young girls and a night reading in a settlement run by a racist tyrant.

Hanks, who will be 65 this year, is a Hollywood senior statesman, and -- like Washington, Streep, Clooney -- has a magnitude that brings others into vehicles in which they can shine. Hanks is Hanks throughout News; he can be no one else. But the film also features solid moments from featured players. In addition to Miss Zengel, Michael Angelo Covino as the lead trafficker, Elizabeth Marvel as a Dallas hotelier and Captain's paramour and Fred Hechinger as a good-hearted young marauder are especially good.