The western is not only the lyrical and inflamed space of adventure, of the conquest of the limit, of the omnimous power of the wild ... It is also written in prose.

Besides the epic, there is the equestrian.

And there, in the modest terrain of the perhaps banal, is justice, not just order;

equality, not just respect.

The law, as it were, convinces before it wins;

create community instead of imposing it;

not simply conquers but gives meaning.

That's what

The Man Who Killed Liberty Valance is about

and that's what, with the right distances, is

News from the great world

, the film that Paul Greengrass now premieres with Tom Hanks

in the skin of a modern James Stewart.

The idea is to recompose in these convulsive times of assaults on the Capitol the perhaps forgotten grammar of noble, simple and imperishable gestures.

And decent.

Perhaps nothing spectacular or cathartic, but just fair.

Let's say that

the filmmaker manages to make a social comment as timely as it is delicate,

while also recovering for himself and everyone else the grace and power of

the foundational stories of civilization.

This is also the western, the genre that founded the cinema.

The director manages to make a timely social comment while recovering for himself and everyone else the grace of the founding stories

To place ourselves,

we are in Ford territory, John Ford.

If before we mentioned his monument, not only film, from 1962, it is also convenient to bring up his other touchstone from 1956:

Centaurs of the desert

.

The story is told of a man who has to return to his family of German origin a girl kidnapped as a baby by the Kiowa Indians.

He is professionally dedicated to going from town to town, all consumed by the fever of conquest and the cancer of illiteracy, reading the most curious news in the newspapers.

Hence, the title.

He is an imperial Tom Hanks,

the same one who, not coincidentally, served as master of ceremonies at the anti-Trump inauguration a few days ago.

She is Helena Zengel,

a precocious prodigy who was already featured in the German film

System Crasher

.

He brings the word to the always hieratic gesture of John Wayne;

her, nerve to Natalie Wood's sooty face.

And so.

Paul Greengrass always agitated, always aware of the expressive carnality of the camera

(think of his films

The Bourne Myth

or

United 93

), now calms down to let the screen soak up the immense, the obvious, the eternal.

The strategy is not so much to recreate or honor, much less deconstruct anything, as to summon the old spirits of an ancient art built from the elemental beauty of a well-composed plane.

It is true that, at times, the film made as if it were a road movie, seems so capricious in the arrangement of events and adventures as simply lazy.

But

Tom Hanks is there to remind us once again that virtue is its own reward

, that goodness does not understand pragmatism and that

a cart on the straight line to the horizon is already, without further ado, a western.

+ Modesty can be the most powerful of the virtues.

Tom Hanks as a paradigm of life-Modesty can also be the most boring of justifications.

Even though Tom Hanks is still Tom Hanks

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