Do you remember as a kid when you went to the movies? The movie would end and you'd sit there for a minute, allowing everything you've seen to flutter through your mind before you stood up. On your way home, you recounted all the good parts and realized the whole movie was all the good parts.
#Newsoftheworld does just that. It is a fine piece of movie making and storytelling. Although you kind of know what is going to happen, you still want the director to take you through the steps.
Janet Maslin of the New York Times in her review of the book, writes: Ms. Jiles writes books that bring the natural world to life and are also agonizingly eventful. Her story in “News of the World” is painfully simple. An old man, Capt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd, is content to make his living as an itinerant news reader in Texas until he is charged with a much more difficult mission. A white girl, about 10, has been “rescued” from the Kiowa Indians who kidnapped her and killed her immediate family four years earlier. Would he please take her down to the San Antonio region and return her to her closest living relatives, an aunt and uncle?
This comes at a very bad time for Captain Kidd. It is the winter of 1870, and he is busy spreading the news that the 15th Amendment has just been ratified, extending the right to vote to all men without regard to race or previous condition of servitude. “That means colored gentlemen,” he tells his audiences. “Let us have no vaporings or girlish shrieks.” He would much rather continue with this than take a strange little girl on a long journey. “I am astonished,” he says, looking at her. “The child seems artificial as well as malign.”
I haven't read the book, but this movie has it all. The best of mankind, the resilience of the human spirit and what it means to find home.
I give this movie five stars.
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