118 min | PG-13 | December 25, 2020 | Universal Pictures
Five years after the Civil War, a former Confederate captain rides across Texas reading newspapers aloud to townsfolk for a dime a head. He takes charge of an orphaned girl raised by the Kiowa and points her toward family she does not remember. Paul Greengrass shoots a Western with the precision of a man who has never made one, and it shows in both directions.
News of the World is a post-Civil War Western built around a man who reads. Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels Reconstruction-era Texas reading newspapers aloud to paying crowds for a dime a head. He brings the wider world to towns that cannot read it for themselves. On the road he takes charge of Johanna Leonberger, a German-American girl whose family was killed and who was then raised by the Kiowa. Kidd agrees to deliver her hundreds of miles to relatives she does not remember. The film uses their journey to argue that a fractured country needs shared stories, and that Kidd’s readings are one fragile way of supplying them.
Tom Hanks plays Kidd as a tired, decent man carrying grief he does not name. He gives the captain a steady reading voice and a stillness that registers as decades of accumulated loss. Helena Zengel plays Johanna as feral and watchful, a child who has lost two families and trusts no one. She speaks little English, and Zengel builds the character almost entirely through her eyes and her posture. The two actors earn the trust the story needs without forcing it. Michael Angelo Covino plays Almay, a trafficker who wants the girl, with a flat menace that gives the film its one real threat.
Paul Greengrass directs from a script he wrote with Luke Davies, adapting the novel by Paulette Jiles. Greengrass built his name on handheld chaos in the Bourne films and Captain Phillips. Here he abandons it. The camera holds still and frames the Texas plains in wide, classical compositions that let the landscape carry the scale. The standout sequence is a gunfight on a rocky hillside where Kidd and Johanna are pinned down and short on ammunition. Greengrass stages it with patience and geography rather than speed, and it is the most alive the film gets.
News of the World is handsome, sturdy, and safe. Every beat lands exactly where you expect it to land. The road movie hits its marks, the bond forms on schedule, and the obstacles arrive on time. Greengrass and Hanks are too skilled to make a bad film and too cautious to make a surprising one. The result is an old-fashioned Western that honors its form without testing it. It moves you a little and challenges you not at all.