News of the World: Deserves banner headlines

News of the World (2020) • View trailer

4.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for violence, occasional profanity, disturbing images and dramatic intensity

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.31.20

Paul Greengrass always makes thoughtful, emotionally engaging films, whether crowd-pleasing thrillers — three entries in the Jason Bourne series — or ripped-from-the-headlines dramas, such as Bloody Sunday, United 93 and 22 July.

 

Having been stopped on the road by a gang of questionable intent, Jefferson Kidd
(Tom Hanks) and his young companion (Helena Zengel) are "escorted" into the
nearby community of Durand, their fate most definitely uncertain.

His newest, based on poet/author Paulette Jiles’ 2016 novel of the same title, is a bit of both … due to current events that weren’t as obvious when she wrote her book.

 

News of the World — opening today in operational movie theaters — is set in early 1870, in the untamed and dangerous border between South Texas and Indian territory. Although the Civil War is five years gone, the nation remains bitterly divided; that’s particularly true in this state. Texas has yet to be readmitted to the Union, having refused thus far to ratify the 13th amendment banning slavery.

 

Patrols of Union soldiers maintain an uneasy peace in towns, and on the roads linking them; their presence is just as likely to inflame tension, as prevent it. Half of the population passionately fought for a vision of the country that was defeated; it’s unclear whether America — as a unified entity — can heal itself. Information itself is suspect, depending on its source.

 

Sound familiar?

 

Capt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks), a veteran of three wars, leads a peripatetic life within this environment. He travels from town to town, armed with newspapers and broadsheets, and draws crowds as a non-fiction storyteller who shares the news of presidents and queens, glorious feuds, devastating catastrophes and gripping incidents involving individual people.

 

He’s no Charles Dickens, with a thunderous and well-acted performance; he hunches over and squints through a magnifying glass while reading the tiny print aloud. But his delivery is no less captivating, thanks to Hanks’ warmth and sincerity; Kidd has a dignified bearing that grants him authority. People hang on his words, and he fills the house at 10 cents a head, thereby earning a meager but reliable living.

 

He’s wary and careful, when on the road with his humble wagon; roving bands of Union soldiers aren’t necessarily any safer than thieves and cutthroats.

 

One day he chances upon a frightened 10-year-old girl (Helena Zengel). Papers recovered from her demolished wagon — her adult companion having been lynched, due to his skin color — reveal that she’s Johanna Leonberger, whose family was killed six years earlier by the Kiowa tribe, who then raised her as one of their own. She’s now being returned to her biological aunt and uncle against her will, after her Kiowa home was burned by the soldiers who “rescued” her. In effect, she has been kidnapped twice.

 

Kidd hasn’t the faintest idea what to do with her. He tries first to enlist official Union aid; when that fails, he attempts to temporarily leave the girl in the care of friends in the nearest town. But she’s wild, speaks only Kiowa, and is hostile to this “civilized” world she never has experienced. Kidd ultimately decides to deliver her himself, to where the law insists she belongs.

 

Dark Waters: Deadly serious

Dark Waters (2019) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, disturbing images and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.13.19

Mark Ruffalo has become this generation’s Henry Fonda. Or Jimmy Stewart.

When corporate attorney Robert Bilott (Mark Ruffalo, right) reluctantly visits the cattle
ranch that has been in Wilbur Tennant's (Bill Camp) family for generations, they're
startled by the sudden apperance of a heifer that appears to be viciously rabid.

Ruffalo’s performances radiate the same intelligence and integrity. The same resolute dedication to a cause. The same anguish at the realization that greed and cowardice too frequently trump benevolence and compassion. The same disbelief over the ease with which people in power feel no remorse over lying, cheating and ill-treating those less equipped to fight back.

The primary difference is that Fonda and Stewart mostly played fictional characters in their iconic films, such as The Grapes of Wrath and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Ruffalo takes it a step further, tackling actual individuals in an expanding roster of fact-based sagas that qualify as searing advocacy cinema.

He earned his third Academy Award nomination for 2015’s Spotlight, while portraying Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe reporter Mike Rezendes, who led the investigative charge that exposed the local Catholic Archdiocese’s cover-up of child molestation cases. The film deservedly won that year’s Best Picture Oscar, and the viewing experience is jaw-dropping, as Rezendes and his fellow reporters uncover proof of the church’s ever-more-heinous behavior.

Dark Waters is even harder to watch.

Much harder.

This new film, also lifted from headlines, depicts defense attorney Robert Bilott’s heroic determination — over the course of two decades — to force DuPont to reveal that it had knowingly poisoned people for even longer. And not only had concealed such monstrous behavior, but defiantly maintained that it had done nothing “legally wrong,” and therefore could not be “blamed” for anything.

That last little detail comes well into a saga that already has become grim viewing. Director Todd Haynes’ approach is methodical and relentless, carefully fueled by the strong character dynamics that he delivered in Far from Heaven, Carol and other previous films. 

The information dump is considerable but not insurmountable. In effect, we gradually learn the degrees of DuPont’s perfidy along with Bilott, while he becomes a reluctant investigator in the mold of Rezendes and — reaching further back — Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, in All the President’s Men.

Or, more closely linked, Erin Brockovich, in the 2000 drama named for that similarly righteous crusader. That case also started with water.

Philomena: Grace and forgiveness

Philomena (2013) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rating: PG-13, and quite needlessly, for fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.29.13

Some of them sneak up on us.

At first, journalist Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan) agrees to investigate the intriguing
tale related by Philomena Lee (Judi Dench) because he smells a potentially great
story. As time passes, however, her refined behavior — and generosity of spirit —
awaken a reaction that he never expected: He begins to care.

At first blush, Philomena seems the sort of mildly detached, urbane dramedy that the Brits deliver so well: a “two-hander” that places a prim, proper and deeply spiritual old woman in a car with a cynical younger journalist. It’s a road trip, a genre with which we’re quite familiar: These two disparate characters will get to know each other, achieving mutual respect and trust as the journey continues. Cue the inevitable happy conclusion.

Except that Philomena isn’t like that at all.

Director Stephen Frears’ new film is an acting showcase for star Judi Dench, who delivers yet another mesmerizing performance. Co-star Steve Coogan is a revelation in a dramatic role: a quite impressive change of pace for a confrontational British comic actor who has been nothing short of irritating in gawdawful projects such as Hamlet 2 and Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story.

They’re marvelous together, displaying an oil-and-vinegar dynamic that leaves us wondering, as the story proceeds, which one will get fed up first, and tell the other to sod off. Now, that's dramatic tension.

And, oh my goodness, the story. Shattering, unforgettable, deeply moving and laced with surprises, right up to the final scenes that deliver a truly unexpected — and frankly heart-stopping — portrait of vicious, unrepentant evil.

If that didn’t pique your curiosity, nothing will.

Coogan doesn’t merely play a featured acting role; he also co-produced and co-wrote (with Jeff Pope) the film, having been deeply touched by the book on which this factual story is based: Martin Sixsmith’s The Lost Child of Philomena Lee. Up to this moment, Coogan’s writing oeuvre has been similarly comic, often of the shrieking variety; with Pope’s help, he nonetheless delivers a sensitive, restrained and genuinely touching script.

Clearly, Coogan recognized that he need not oversell the material with florid dialogue or acting histrionics; the story’s core facts deliver their own emotional wallop. Besides which, Frears (Dirty Pretty Things, The Queen and many others) is too accomplished a director to allow that sort of nonsense. He guided Helen Mirren to an Academy Award; he may well have done the same for Dench here.