News of the World

I’d doubt it if author Paulette Jiles hadn’t at some point imagined Tom Hanks in the role of Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd when she was writing her novel News of the World. The role just oozes that honest-to-goodness aura particular to Tom Hanks — a kind man of dignity who has been through enough, and who will undoubtedly do the right thing, even at the wrong time.

So, when we first see Hanks in the screen adaptation of News of the World, the imagination takes little effort in placing him in Kidd’s mould. The stereotyped casting, in this case, suits the story.

Kidd is a Civil War veteran in 1870, whose day job is to be a human news aggregator. He rides from town to town in Texas, with a bunch of weeks-old newspapers, and reads to the locals for a dime.

The money is of no consequence — those who can pay are welcomed, for most it’s free. The news he shares is a mix of entertainment and dread — he mixes reports of meningitis outbreaks, coal mine fires and ferry accidents between trivial laugh-worthy side stories. He is a kind old soul who has suffered enough — there are battle scars on his body — and he doesn’t want to return to his wife; knowing the type of man he is, the idea doesn’t fit his image.

Both the Tom Hanks-starrer News of the World and the Denzel Washington-starrer The Little Things are like films from another time, to be cherished

Around him, natives of the red state display open scorn at soldiers from blue states; it has been five years since the Civil War ended, but change is slow and acceptance of the idea of a United States appears to be reluctant.

In midst of this barely-visible political and social change, Kidd finds an upturned wagon with a girl who doesn’t speak English. Her documents call her Johanna (Helena Zengel) — or so Kidd thinks; born to German farmers, her family had been massacred by the Native American Kiowa tribe, who became her new family until they were massacred as well. Kidd is burdened with the task of delivering her to an aunt and an uncle who live far away.

Their journey is a meek adventure that we’ve probably seen in Westerns: inclement weather, bad guys, horses and wagons that don’t make it through, and a mix of sympathetic and spiteful people they meet in the middle of the trip.

Despite co-writer and director Paul Greengrass’s grip on the story and his actors — Zengel stays away from the cute little girl stereotype, while Hanks plays into his typecast — there isn’t a lot of new in the News of the World. But then again, the story doesn’t demand overzealous ruckus to honour the genre’s tradition.

Here it’s the little things that matter, and the film is full of them; some happening as Kidd walks by towns, others apparent in the wilderness of the barren landscape. It’s sombre, heartbreaking and beautiful, all at the same time.

The Little Things

Speaking of little things mattering, there are quite a few to take in, in the routine thriller-esque first frames of The Little Things. A girl driving alone on the highway at night is stalked by a car with more horsepower. The car plays a cat-and-mouse game in the middle of nowhere. She, knowing full well the dangers, speeds away as he slows down, stopping by a roadside motel with bright lights and locked gates.

We don’t see the man who comes out of the car — we just notice the dark, out-of-focus semblance of his gait. The girl escapes, losing the power of her legs, as a truck — as ominous and alien as her pursuer — screeches to a stop in front of her on the highway. And just like that, the girl on the road is forgotten about in the story.

It is assumed that she didn’t make it because other young girls are popping up dead at two ends of the country. The killer has no motive; a later deduction clues in the detectives that the perpetrator drives a car with a big trunk. The clues are scarce, but that’s how real-life detective work was in the early ’90s, where insufferable geeks ran files on PCs running green-coloured text commands (there were no graphical interfaces back then). The only competent staff one got were the doctors running the mortuary, and experienced men in the police force.

Joe Deacon (Denzel Washington, excellent as always), often addressed as Deke, is one of the good guys with experience. One can guess Deke to have a lot of backstory; it’s in the way he talks, and the way he strides, and the way he extricates a crime scene in his mind. “It’s the little things,” he tells Jim Baxter (Remi Malek), the sharp newbie at the department.

The two eventually hone in on a target: a weird man working at a dry-cleaning store (Jared Leto, superb). He fits the profile: an unblinking, creepily calm, sarcastic-toned sociopath with long, unkempt hair, who keeps up with true crime stories. He even has a car with a big trunk.

Even when the little things usually match up, there is a chance that your gut — no matter how experienced — will be prone to prejudice and fallibilities.

The Little Things was written 30 year ago by John Lee Hancock (Blindside, Rookie, Alamo, Saving Mr. Banks). It could have been directed by Steven Spielberg or Clint Eastwood. The latter would have been an excellent choice; Hancock directs in the same vein, probably because he wrote the screenplay that way. Deliberate, minimalistic, full of fleeting context and thick dark atmosphere, with people who are either emotionally damaged, or in midst of getting damaged.

Like the News of the World, it is unremarkable — and if it came out three decades ago, it would be indistinguishable from the norm on television.

Today, both appear as forlorn pieces of nostalgia — or as A.O. Scott of the New York Times compares in his review, and I paraphrase the context: ‘these movies are like the old coats hanging in the closet for decades, waiting for the right actors and the right time to get them made. Once they would be humdrum routine fare, today they’re worth at least some critical acclaim — especially if one waits till the end.’

News of the World, rated 16+ for scenes of grit and grief, is released worldwide by Universal and Netflix. The Little Things, released theatrically and on HBO Max, is rated R for scenes of violence and brief nudity.

Published in Dawn, February 7th, 2021

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