News of the World REVIEW
Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels the backroads of Texas reading the news to people so isolated they are hungry for it. People gather and put dimes in a bucket to hear Jefferson read from a collection of newspapers that he curates and synthesizes for them. And then, he comes across a wrecked wagon and an orphaned child – a young girl who has been living with the Kiowa since her family was killed by them when she was an infant. She has no knowledge of English and no family to speak of any more. All she has is some official papers that indicate that she was the child of German immigrants and that she has family in Castorville, Texas.
Jefferson and Johanna thus begin an adventure of epic and danger-laden proportions as Jefferson attempts to return her to what semblance of family she may have. He, a Civil War veteran of the confederacy with war trauma who lost his wife while serving. She, a traumatized child lost in the woods violently removed from her biological family and then from her Kiowa family and then again violently from the courier who the army had hired to return her to her kin.
One can tell that the film is all about how to move on from devastating loss. The theme emerges as Johanna tries to recover from her losses, Jefferson tries to recover from his losses, and the South tries to recover from its losses. “Your stories can only keep you company for so long,” one of Jefferson’s acquaintances tells him. “I guess we both have demons to face going down this road” Jefferson says to his new charge in a moment when she clearly begins to remember the attack that took her family from this world. “Going back is not good. Need to put it behind you. Move forward. Stay on that line and don’t look back.” “No,” she says in Kiowa, “to move forward you must remember.”
I suspect that her point is that one cannot partake of the present when one’s soul is stuck in some un-resolved, unsettled, or un-cauterized wound.
To tell you how Jefferson and Johanna find their way out of there traumas is what this story is all about. A story that kept me company one Spring evening in May.
Question for Comment: Do you have something left unresolved that keeps to from experiencing life as it unfolds in the present?
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