Tom Hanks plays a grizzled old timer in this gritty western, which was finally released on HBO Max today.

I waited for the kids to go to bed and tuned in. The wife also likes Tom Hanks movies, but shies away from westerns more than other kinds of movies. She really doesn't like vignettes, no matter how magically the separate stories might eventually coalesce. This isn't a vignette, but as a close second to the movies she'll most likely pass on.

She missed out, because it was really pretty good.  

I first saw an article talking about the movie as released on Netflix. Sadly, they meant the DVD service, which we dropped last year when I realized we'd had our last delivery of disks for about a year without watching them. Streaming is winning, for sure. 

Unlike the wife, I like a good western. Fewer than ever are really about the rough characters and hard times, and even more fewer about the racism and underlying imperialism. Instead, the good ones seem to be about the characters, relationships, and interactions, and the western bits are about scene and tempo and motivation without technology and its influence or pace.

In this, Tom Hanks plays a traveling news man, who reads the news instead of gathering the news. In the days before radio, and with the difficulty of long distance news, he brings along newspapers from afar and reads them in gatherings in the towns he passes for donations of pennies per listener. Along his journey, he is given a task to escort an orphaned girl "rescued" from "wild savages" to her estranged and distant family. He's hampered in his travels by being a veteran of the south, just after the end of the Civil War, and that the girl doesn't want to go.

In the end, it's really about the discovery of who his character is, between his private and hidden past and what kind of person he wants to really be. It's about the bond he creates with the girl, and the creation of family out of difficult circumstances. That it's a western is used to facilitate the slow journey and lack of trust and culture across what are today relatively small distances.

A pretty good movie, and uses some of the best parts of the wild west, while carefully treading that line of recognizing the history of the day, and the awareness of how people should be (and should have been) treated. It doesn't fall into some of the trope of historic Cowboys and Indians, or westerns in general, but does use the historic fears and misunderstandings to benefit the story.