Legends of Western Cinema Week || News of the World {2020}

{The Plot}

After the Civil War, Captain Jeffrey Kidd makes his living travelling from town to town and reading national news for the citizens.  In between jobs, he stumbles across Johanna, a young girl who has lived with the Kiowa for six years since being abducted by them after they murdered her family.  Following the government's massacre of the Kiowa, she is supposed to be delivered back to her extended family.  Kidd finds Johanna after her escort is lynched, and he decides to transport her himself.  

{My Thoughts}

Spoilers throughout.

The movie is solid; one wouldn't really expect anything different from a Tom Hanks Western.  The dynamic between Kidd and Johanna may not be original, but it's moving nonetheless.  And for the majority of the runtime, the narrative is thoughtfully and compellingly drawn.  (The confrontation with the would-be traffickers, followed by the flight, pursuit, and shoot-out among the hills, is a particularly notable sequence.) 

Unfortunately, the film starts to feel tired and cliche around the three-quarters mark, falling back on several worn-out Western staples. 

The wagon crashes.  The horses are euthanized.  The Weary Travelers must Travel Forth on Weary Bleeding Feet.  The water runs out.  The sandstorm comes.  The indigenous tribe drifts into frame and drifts out of frame in a single-scene exodus. 

Eventually, Kidd delivers Johanna to her German relatives, who are Frosty & Rigid because — well, they're German. 

After that, he returns to his old home in San Antonio and finally mourns his wife, who died several years before.  (Side note:  Watching an old man's shaking hands remove his wedding ring and place it in a trinket box on top of his wife's grave will make you The Big Sad.  Props to Hanks for that scene, in particular.)

John was a sweet subplot, too.

Finally, after all of that, we come to Kidd's conversation with an old friend:  a conversation which, frankly, amounts to the same "broken country" spiel delivered by two world-weary veterans who have seen too much that we've received from practically every post-war drama on record.  

Now, believe it or not, I'm not trying to discount the legitimacy of that spiel.  It's important.  Of course it's a staple in stories that center around people who are trying to rebuild their lives and communities after the cataclysm of war.  The problem is that the spiel needs to be well-executed in order to be effective.  (Even the worthiest of messages begin to feel tired and reused if they are explored in the exact same way every time they appear.)  

Unfortunately, I don't think it was well-executed here.  Instead, it feels like a clumsy and belated attempt to spin a random philosophical angle from a story that has in no way shored up a narrative foundation capable of supporting such an angle.

All of these complaints aside, the movie wrapped up with a fairytale ending which I wasn't necessarily counting on. And yes, while cynics could argue that this roseate conclusion is a bit of a flight in the face of reality, this particular flight made me oodles of happy, so I don't care. Give me your tired, your poor, your odd-couple found families yearning to live their best lives together unencumbered by the elitist artistic demands of bitter killjoys.  

Watching Kidd come back to Johanna and choke out, "You belong with me" in Kiowa, followed by that last news-reading scene with the uproarious "Don't you believe a word of it" and Johanna's first real beaming smile?  That was worth the price of admission, for me.  Pitfalls notwithstanding, the ending made me happy enough to forgive almost all of the movie's other missteps.  And it was more than enough to make my overall impression of the film a positive one.

Have you watched News of the World?

What are some Western tropes that you're tired of seeing?