In News of the World, a Civil War veteran played by Tom Hanks decides to take a young
orphan girl across Texas in 1870 so she can be reunited with family members she's never known.
This is the end of News of the World explained.
When we meet Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, he feels like a man
a bit untethered from the world around him. Over the course of News of the World, Kidd's
relationship with Johanna helps to transform him into a man with something to care about again.
He sees Johanna as not just a challenge he's eager to surmount, but an eager and curious spirit who
complements his own desire to share his knowledge with the rest of the world. We don't know what
awaits them in the future, but it's clear from the film's final scene that Kidd is a changed man.
When we meet Kidd, he's making his living as a professional reader of news,
but his job is about more than merely reading from a newspaper. He's a curator, an orator,
and a showman, and his interest in the kinds of stories he wants to tell shifts along with
the film, as he delivers everything from delightful romps to hard news.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd and I'm here tonight to read
the news from across this great world of ours." So what does that mean for Kidd's professional
future? By the end of the film he's happily news-reading with Johanna by his side,
but he also mentions his past as the owner of a printing company,
something it seems like he'd be very good at with the right financial backing. We know from history
that men who get paid to deliver the news don't go away. They just evolve with the technology.
So will Kidd evolve his news-reading to change with the times? Will he go back to printing?
The young girl known as Cicada to her Kiowa family and Johanna to her German family is
an intriguing puzzle throughout News of the World. And yet we do get to see an arc
unfolding through her nonverbal communication as Johanna shifts from being desperately sad to lose
her Kiowa family to confused and angered by her German family to eager and happy
to be with Kidd for the rest of her life. Still, the question remains what exactly
Johanna's future truly holds. Given that she's essentially the child of two worlds,
it would not be hard to see her as an advocate for Native American rights as an adult, fighting for
social justice with her adoptive father's passion for knowledge supporting her along the way.
Even if that's not the path she takes, though, she has a bright and loving future ahead.
"See all those words? Put them all together and you
have a story."
News of the World is set in 1870, five years after the end of the American Civil War, in a state
that's found it particularly difficult to keep up with the reconstruction era. Violent racism
remains rampant, roads everywhere are dangerous, and people are willing to do just about anything
to survive or to profit off others. Very early on in the film, Kidd tells us that he is a part of
this aftermath in a no small way, having been a soldier in Texas who didn't surrender until
weeks after the death of Abraham Lincoln. He is a product of this time, and he suffers for it.
But of course, we know the history of Reconstruction. What the film is more
interested in showing us is an intimate look at the human cost, because as Kidd later explains, he
was off fighting a war on behalf of other people, and all he got for his trouble were some scars
and the fact that he wasn't there for the death of his wife. There was a tremendous economic,
political, and social cost to the American Civil War, some of which we still feel today.
But it also left a more human carnage behind, psychological scarring that wasn't easily healed.
News of the World is, at its core, a story of two people who have both lost their family.
Johanna is, as Kidd eventually learns, an orphan two times over,
having lost her birth parents when she was too young to really remember them
and then losing her adoptive parents at the hands of people who thought they were saving her.
Kidd, for his part, is also without a family, traveling around and making plenty of friends
across Texas even as he refuses to go home to reckon with the loss of his wife.
Both of them are on a journey of reconciliation, one that truly picks up steam when Johanna makes
a choice. Faced with the prospect of rejoining a group of Kiowa who just happen to be traveling
nearby, she instead asks them for a horse, brings it back to Kidd, and keeps traveling with him.
It takes a little longer for Kidd to catch up to her emotional wavelength,
but the message is clear. This is the moment when she decides that he is her family, and because
he ultimately makes the same choice, they can both find their taste for familial love again.
The entire movie hinges on that choice, when she asks to stay rather than to go, and it
perfectly sets up the final moments of the film. Check out one of our newest videos right here!
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