Captain phillips director12/12/2023 ![]() ![]() Ferrari”) lends Southern authenticity to the proceedings. Thomas Francis Murphy, Clint Obenchain and Christopher Hagen make memorable impressions as heavies. And if that entails sewing dissent among the oppressed, uninformed and brainwashed, that’s his version of heroism. Hanks has one perfectly understated moment recognizing that as the girl Johanna reasons a way to make an ambush on the trail more of a fair fight.īut Captain Kidd isn’t here to “clean up” this or that violent town, but inform the masses. Zengel throws herself into “gone native,” allowing the audience and Kidd to underestimate her. He’s a man who realizes, reaching out to this child he has a hard time understanding, that “we both have demons to face” from their past. Kidd isn’t a gunslinger or violent Western archetype. He’s here for what his screen presence has come to represent - decency. Hanks mercifully spares us his “Ladykillers” Southern accent. And everywhere the “Blue Bellies” aren’t, informal militias with guns cling to their grudges, their prejudices, their power and their treason, enforcing their will by violence. “Bushwhackers,” veterans turned outlaws, weren’t limited to Missouri. ![]() Captain Kidd tries to pass her off to the Feds, but they’d just as soon he take her to her folks in Castroville, 400 miles away.Īlong the way, he will consult with old acquaintances (Elizabeth Marvel, Ray McKinnon and Mare Winningham), try to carry on making a living and face the “dangers” of the road in largely-lawless post-War central Texas. She is wild, if not quite feral, speaking only Kiowa and snatches of German she remembers. And the soldier’s cargo is a blonde girl (Helena Zengel) rescued by troops when they slaughtered the Indian tribe that took her as a hostage years before after slaughtering her family. The Black trooper who drove it has been lynched. The last thing this solitary man needs is trouble on the trail, which is just what he gets when he stops at a wrecked wagon. The stories, which haven’t trickled to Wichita Falls and the like, draw gasps, applause and bursts of outrage.īut weathered, white-bearded Captain Kidd has learned how to work a crowd, stirring the heart or calming troubled waters. ![]() His readings in towns too small for a newspaper or otherwise limited in their news (“low information voters”) come from The Carthage Banner and The Clifton Record, The Dallas Herald, The Times of India and the New York Times. Hanks is Captain Jefferson Kirby Kidd, late of the Third Texas Infantry, a man who has to travel his own “Blue Bellies” (Federal troops) occupied state with a copy of his “Loyalty Oath.” The “late unpleasantness” is an open sore in unreconstructed Texas. There are hints of “The Searchers” in this quest to take a child “home,” and a whiff of Mark Twain’s story and attitudes in its tale of a well-spoken man making his way by doing readings from the world’s newspapers as entertainment to the locals.Īnd in the hands of Tom Hanks and his “Captain Phillips” director, Paul Greengrass, this adaptation of a Paulette Jiles novel becomes a Western parable for these “troubled times,” a story of race and unrepentant racism, men of violence who won’t give up that violence and the power of a free press to rectify that. “News of the World” is a stately, almost old-fashioned Western saga about a widowed Civil War veteran trying to do right by one orphaned girl in 1870 Texas. ![]()
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