The Rescuers

LET HIM GO Kevin Costner and Diane Lane re-team for a tense period western.

WIherever you stand on Man Of Steel, it’s hard to argue with the casting of Ma and Pa Kent – Diane Lane and Kevin Costner were born to play Superman’s adoptive parents. So when it came to casting similarly wholesome midwestern couple the Blackledges, who saddle up to rescue their grandson in Let Him Go, writer/director Thomas Bezucha knew precisely where to turn.

“Truthfully told, I had not seen those movies,” Bezucha tells Teasers from his New York home. “But I did see a snippet of a press junket they had done together for [Man Of Steel]. The way they interacted, I was like: ‘That’s what I want.’”

Adapted from the 2013 novel of the same name and set in early ’60s Montana, Let Him Go follows retired couple Margaret and George. After the death of their son in a riding accident, daughterin-law Lorna re-marries into the Weboys – a dangerous family that lives off the grid and above the law. So when Lorna skips town with her son Jimmy at the behest of the Weboys’ fearsome matriarch Blanche (Lesley Manville), Margaret and George set out to bring their grandson home, whatever the cost.

For Bezucha, whose previous credits include The Family Stone and The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society, Let Him Go represented a major change of gears. “I loved that it was such a simple story,” says Bezucha, who believed in the project so completely he wrote the script on spec. “It was super character-based, but felt biblical in its themes.”

Those themes orbit around a provocative central question – how far would you go to protect your family? - and encompass the class divide between the self-sufficient Blackledges and the grifting Weboys. “There’s a little