OVP: News of the World (2020)

Film: News of the World (2020)

Stars: Tom Hanks, Helena Zengel, Mare Winningham, Bill Camp

Director: Paul Greengrass

Oscar History: 4 nominations (Best Sound, Score, Cinematography, Production Design)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

One of the comments I've heard the most about this year's Oscars is not from film fans, who ardently will argue with you that this was a "good year for movies" (a conversation for a later day, but it wasn't-every year has good movies that come out, but not every year can be a "great year for movies" because axiomatically if every year is a "great year" none of them are...and 2020 let us down in that regard even if there were some gems along the way).  Instead, it's from lay fans of movies who simply "haven't seen any of the films that are going to compete" and while I think this isn't quite fair, it's reality to admit that without a communal pop culture, without parties & office lunches, there aren't as many movies that have entered the zeitgeist or popular culture in the way that they normally would have.  This is true for News of the World, a film that stars everyman movie star Tom Hanks (who doesn't love Tom Hanks?), which would've been a hit in a normal circumstance.  It's a big, pleasant, well-crafted adventure film about Hanks & a young woman whom he must protect against the odds.  This is 100% the kind of movie my family would've watched as a collective over Christmas, and it's the kind that word-of-mouth would've made into a proper hit, potentially enough so that it'd be a Best Picture nominee in the vein of The Blind Side or The Help or Philomena (too popular to ignore).  Alas, without box office, News of the World has to stand on its pleasant but broad appeal, and likely won't be a big part of the Oscar conversation outside maybe Cinematography.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie centers on Captain Jefferson Kidd (Hanks) a Confederate soldier who in 1870 now travels from town to town, reading newspapers to the populace for 10 cents, giving them an idea of what's happening from city-to-city (think of it as a very early version of the evening news).  Traveling from one such city, he finds a lynched black man and along with him a young white girl named Johanna (Zengel), who has been living with the Kiowa tribe & whose family had been murdered on the prairie.  She doesn't speak English, but she does have an aunt-and-uncle that live a great distance from there who might be able to take care of her.  He initially tries to give her to a family to wait for the train to take her to her aunt-and-uncle, but soon learns that she'll run away in that situation, and takes her himself.  Eventually the two warm to each other as they face the rough-and-tumble world of a post-Civil War Texas, and come to find an understanding with each other.  When it's clear that he must put the demons of his old life behind him (he has been suffering from PTSD after the war, and the unfairness that he went to war but it was his wife who ended up dying before they could be reunited), he decides to adopt Johanna from her uncle-and-aunt (as they are not fit to take care of such a child), and they start reading the news across the country together.

The movie is routine, even if it's occasionally scary (such as a standoff with a group of men who are trying to kidnap Johanna).  There is no overarching villain (no baddie comes back repeatedly along their journey), and it isn't trying to break new ground.  The idea of a jaded adult gaining perspective from being forced to care for a child is the basis of hundreds, if not thousands, of movies, and so you know how this will end before we even meet Johanna.

That said, routine isn't always bad, and Tom Hanks continues his late career renaissance by breathing life into this figure.  He plays Kidd as too modern, too woke (and Hanks, who has been hit-or-miss with accents in his career, doesn't remotely attempt the Texas twang most of his costars are sporting, his northern California accent there throughout), but this is such a surface-level film it doesn't really matter. You want to see the two win, you want to see good triumph over evil, and on that populist appeal it delivers.  I name-checked The Blind Side and The Help above, which may have sounded like an insult, but I don't put it in that realm-it's not a bad movie.  It's just the kind of movie that, with Oscar, it's not the critics who will need to rally but audiences.  I suspect that won't happen, and thus this will be the film that does well on cable rather than with the Academy, but if you're looking for an uncomplicated, 2020 adventure film, you've come to the right place.