(Some spoilers ahead!)
I wasn’t sure exactly what I was expecting going into Tom Hank’s newest film, ‘News of the World’. I knew it was about a man who goes town to town reading out newspapers to the illiterate townsfolk of post-civil war America. I knew he becomes responsible for escorting a German little girl who was raised by Native American Kiowas back to her surviving family.
But I didn’t know I would come across 2021’s newest star.
Hanks and soon-to-be breakout star Helena Zengel trek across the treacherous and volatile South in the tumultuous years after the Confederate defeat. Nail bitingly tense and fantastically shot, it’s a totally immersive experience. We shudder along the dead-heat roadside with them on their wagon, as you feel the hot Texan wind brush your cheek, the desert dirt coating your lungs. This is a new type of Western – the characters deep and faceted, the storyline innovative and intense.
The same tension remains, the shoot outs, the men with dubious morals, the presence of the wild West as another character, not just a setting. She is tense and visually barren but beautiful at the same time, drawing you in with scenes of great destruction and great freedom.
The divide between the Union and the Confederate is deeply felt in the landscape that Hanks and Zengel travel, and it reminds us that war-torn countries – especially those ripped apart by Civil War – do not knit back together overnight. Harmony is a long road, longer than the 400 miles to Castroville by horse and cart, where Zengel’s family awaits. As they travel the long road, we see snapshots across the uneasy South after the civil war, of those unaccepting of the outcome of the war, of those who feel hard done by the new amendments being brought in by the union. The dissatisfaction and barely concealed tension is palpable, as the us vs them narrative comes to the fore in several particularly tense scenes in a small town that refuses to accept the union’s victory.
‘We have to stop fighting some time,’ Tom Hanks, the ex-confederate captain warns them.
‘Oh, we will.’ The confederates answer. ‘When it’s ours alone.’
But the real reason you’ll end up glued to the screen – though to be fair, 99% of Hank’s movies have us glued to the screen – is Helena Zengel’s ferocious and phenomenal performance. The young actress is only 12 years old and yet towers alongside Hanks in this role, instead of being dwarfed by such a massive and powerful presence. Starting her career at just five years old, the actress was the youngest person to ever receive "Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role" at the German Film Awards in 2019 for her appearance in ‘System Crasher’. The complex and furious relationship between them melts into one of strained trust, that is equally as compelling as the unlikely friendship that grows with each danger they encounter. A duo each with their demons, they communicate in their shared pain if not always in the same language.
Zengel’s character was born German and raised Kiowa so her language and mannerisms manifest as a strange blend of the two cultures. Wild and vital and heart-breaking, her performance is haunting and ethereal, as she mourns the families she has lost on her as of yet short journey through life. She and the landscape become one, the desert protecting her more than once, recognising her as a child of one of its Kiowa wanderers. What was interesting was that the film refused to ‘tame’ her, despite efforts to force her to eat with utensils, dress like a lady, live a settled life.
Mourning is at the heart of the film, as Hanks recognises the same deep ache of grief that haunts him, haunts her too – the complexity of loving her Kiowa family who also killed her birth family, who took away the life she might have had. The moments of peace and connection they experience together are offset by scenes of breathless terror and tension in the trademark shoot-out scenes of Westerns. Harrowing in many ways, but tender and heart-warming in others, it is fitting that she and Hanks are content to wander together at the film’s end, with her never fully settling into a domestic life and him never fully giving in to his demons.
