Peter Viney's Blog

2020
UK release Netflix from 10 February 2021
Directed by Paul Greengrass
Screenplay by Paul Greengrass & Luke Davies
Based on the novel by Paulette Jiles
Music by James Newton Howard

CAST

Tom Hanks – Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd
Helena Zengel- Johanna

with

Elizabeth Marvel- Mrs Gannett
Michael Angel Covino – Almay
Clay James- Almay’s man
Cash Lilley- Almay’s Man
Fred Hechinger- John Calley
Curt Obenchain – Mr Farley
Bill Camp- Mr Branholme
Neil Sandilands- Wilhelm Leonberger
Winsome Brown – Anna Leonberger

There is very little indeed wrong with this film, though for British viewers, the title was a poor choice. It’s like calling it The National Enquirer in the USA. as The News Of The World is the defunct Sunday scandal sheet notorious for topless girls and stories about naughty clerics and celebrities with unusual sexual habits and politicians with serious financial irregularities (often all three in the same story). They got sued for lying once too often and went to the wall.

It’s Tom Hanks first Western, as any reader will know, though he did voice Woody in Toy Story. It’s based on a 2017 novel which I haven’t read:

As I’ve indicated on the cast list, there are two major parts running from beginning to end. Anyone else is a restricted and limited appearance along the way. Helena Zengel is a child prodigy – she was the youngest person ever to win Best Actress in the German Film Awards in 2014, playing a five year old. She really is German (as in the film) and was born in 2008, so just twelve when this film was made. This is her first non-German film. It’s basically her plus one of the world’s best-known and most highly rated actors. She totally holds her own. You won’t be alone if you find parallels with John Ford’s classic The Searchers in terms of both plot line and quality.

Without any spoilers. Tom Hanks plays Captain Kidd, an-ex Confederate army captain. It’s 1870, in Texas. The Union army, as blue coats, are still an ever-present army of occupation. There are hints that it might be illegal for ex-Confederates to have firearms … except for birdshot shotguns. There are undercurrents about a divided country in the aftermath of the Civil War … Union soldiers seem to be supervising gatherings too … but they remain peripheral.

Kidd has found himself a job, collecting newspapers and travelling around telling stories from the news to gatherings of people who are either illiterate or who just can’t afford a newspaper. It’s a dime a head for his show.

He finds a wrecked cart with a lynched man. A sign says his sort is not wanted in Texas … we assume he’s black.

The lynched man was escorting a girl child, Johanna Leonberger, to a Union base. Kidd finds the blonde blue-eyed child in Kiowa Native-American garb. She can’t speak English, so he tries halting German instead. She speaks Kiowa, as he later discovers from the Kiowa speaking Mrs Gannet, and her family were massacred by the Kiowa, but she was adopted and brought up happily as a Kiowa. Then her Kiowa parents were killed by white settlers. She’s a double orphan and wild. As Kidd says in the film, it’s all about: Settlers killing Indians for their land. Indians killing settlers for taking it.

Her Kiowa name is Cicada. Kidd has to drive her 400 miles across Texas to find her surviving uncle and aunt near San Antonio. (And no, they didn’t play Is Anybody Goin’ To San Antone on the soundtrack).

Along the way the kindly and compassionate Kidd goes through a series of adventures, as Johanna (they didn’t play Visions of Johanna either) slowly acquires a smidgeon of broken English and traumatically recalls some German words.

It ticks several major Western boxes. They run into three villains who want to buy the girl, which results in a classic three against one gunfight crawling around huge rocks on a broken mountainside. No rattlesnakes fortunately … it would worry me.

Johanna’s ingenuity saves the day. It’s a marvellous sequence, then it usually is.

They meet the evil local “boss” who is usually a rancher, but in this is a wholesale buffalo skinner, Mr Farley. He boasts that he kills buffalo, Indians, Mexicans and Blacks. He presides over a cowed community (and seems not averse to killing whites too. Probably kittens and puppies given half a chance.) Farley presides over a community called Erath which looks to me a den of Trump supporter ancestors.

It has the essential runaway train stagecoach cart down a long sloping path.

They lose their cart and have to shoot the horse (With hands that were trembling, I picked up my gun, and aimed it at Shep’s faithful head. I had shot the best friend a man ever had, I wished they would shoot me instead … No, they don’t play Old Shep either, and anyway that was a dawg, not a hoss.) So then they have to trek across sun-baked desert, collapsing of thirst.

They meet the Kiowa (obviously having seen a smoke signal), who are kindly and at Johanna’s request give him a horse with saddle. Maybe it was his horse that they’d been towing behind the horse and cart and which escaped the crash. Then the Kiowa trek off into the dust storm on the trail of tears. As he later discovered, the Kiowa had bashed Johanna’s baby sister’s brains out, but that was four year ago when they were Injuns. Now they’re Native-Americans and sympathetic.

When they find the log cabin where Johanna’s parents were murdered, Karen exclaimed ‘I bet she finds her old dolly.’ And indeed she does. We do know our Westerns here.

One fault, if it is such, is near the end when Kidd gallops full pelt across rocky desert. I know it’s not Tom Hanks on the horse. You know it’s not Tom Hanks on the horse. He’s disqualified both on insurance impossibility and age and athleticism. It doesn’t even look like Tom Hanks on a horse.

So in the end it’s a tale of a crusty ageing man and love for an adopted child. At the end, Captain Kidd is doing his show and Kidd and Johanna take bows as the credits start and music plays … just like the end of a theatre play at Shakespeare’s Globe in London or The Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford.

It is, without doubt, a first class Western. Five stars for me. John Newton Howard turns in an original soundtrack that runs the gamut from Ry-Cooder style picking and plucking to the full orchestral magnificence we expect from a classic Western. I’m glad they avoided the tongue-in-cheek “found” songs mentioned above.

I’m left in some awe, and also still wondering if Netflix’s financial model can sustain the production of major blockbuster movies like this.

*****