News of the World (2020) - During this movie my wife said the same thing that she said when we saw “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”, that “Tom Hanks can do anything!”
In this western set in post Civil War Texas in 1870, Hanks plays a former newspaper man and Confederate soldier named Jefferson Kidd who now travels from town to town reading stories out of recent newspapers to the local townsfolk for a small admission fee. He’s not getting rich doing this, but he does get by.
In his travels he comes across in the wilderness a 12(?) year old girl named Johanna after her adult escort had been killed. She is a white girl who had been abducted and had been living with the Kiowa Indians for the last six years, and she pretty much speaks the Kiowa language. Turns out both her birth parents and the Kiowa’s she had been living with are dead, so as it is said in the move, she is an orphan twice over. No doubt due to this, Johanna is hardly a happy camper when she first encounters Kidd. After Kidd consults with local Union soldiers, he takes on the task of transporting the girl to her relatives, an aunt and uncle, so that she can live with them. However, it is a 400 mile trip, so Kidd and Johanna share a number of adventures together, during which they both prove quite resourceful in surviving the events that they face, and also learn to communicate with each other and develop some trust in each other.
Johanna is played by Helena Zengel, who was born in Germany. You expect Tom Hanks to be quite good in most any acting job he takes, but Zengel is terrific in what seems to be her first English language movie/television project. Hanks and Zengel prove to be a great team. This movie is very good, and my wife and I quite enjoyed it.
