News of the World (2020)

(On Cable TV, September 2021) Considering that News of the World is a film about a travelling newsman delivering newspaper stories to backwoods communities in the late nineteenth century, it’s inevitable that viewers would interpret much of the film through modern notions of communication networks. Tom Hanks here plays a travelling packet of information, the Internet of his days moving from town to town at a horse’s unhurried pace. His business model is simple: grab newspapers in big cities, then go to small (largely illiterate) cities and charge for an entertaining recitation of the news. But you can’t make an entire film out of that, so the plot gets in high gear once he encounters a young Native American girl and gives himself the mission to get her “home,” as nebulous a concept as that may be. The road to their destination won’t be simple, what with bandits, enemies and prejudice along the way. It’s a western with a slightly unusual angle — already an achievement—and the execution from writer-director Paul Greengrass (taking a break from frenetic subject matter and camera movements) is just good enough to keep even Western skeptics engaged. Hanks is obviously the main draw here, with a father figure performance kept on edge by some action sequences and one quasi-oneiric sequence in a sandstorm. Helena Zengel makes for an intriguing newcomer as well. News of the World is not that great of a movie, but it goes down easy despite the touches of violence. More significantly, it’s a western that resolutely anticipates the twenty-first century.