It’s grandaddy versus hillbilly as Costner goes on the warpath
The grizzled star’s retired sheriff has pistol-packing rednecks in his sights as he fights to win back his grandson
Let Him Go (15)
Verdict: Very watchable curiosity ★★★✩✩ Come Away (PG)
Verdict: Misbegotten whimsy ★★✩✩✩ One Night In Miami
Verdict: No knockout ★★✩✩✩
FOR much of this year, the pandemic has cruelly kept grandparents away from their grandchildren. Well, Let Him Go is set in the early Sixties and has nothing to do with contagion, yet it addresses just that separation issue.
The difference is that Covid-19 is not at the mercy of Kevin Costner with a gun. Which is a shame, really.
Costner plays George Blackledge, retired Montana sheriff and man of few words, who early in the film finds his only son, James, lying dead after being thrown from a horse on the family farm. We have already ascertained that George’s wife Margaret (Diane Lane) doesn’t have much time for her meek daughter- in- law Lorna, James’s wife. But she is devoted to her newborn grandson, Jimmy.
Three years pass. Lorna gets remarried to the brutish, abusive Donnie Weboy (Will Brittain) and abruptly leaves the area, without so much as a goodbye. Margaret persuades George, against his better instincts, to find them and rescue their beloved grandson from his wicked stepfather.
So off they go to neighbouring North Dakota, where Lorna, Donnie and Jimmy are living with the boorish Weboy clan, ruled over by monstrous matriarch Blanche (Lesley Manville, sporting a slash of scarlet lipstick and an extravagant wig, in possibly the most unlikely role of her illustrious career).
Written and directed by Thomas Bezucha, and adapted from Larry Watson’s 2013 novel of the same name, Let Him Go is a curiosity.
NICELY acted by a fine cast, it is hard to categorise, given the way it mutates from a keenly observed, gently downbeat family drama into a sort of road movie, into a full- on, somewhat lurid revenge thriller, finding room as it goes for a brief foray into the shameful mistreatment of Native Americans.
Still, there are plenty of reasons to see it, not least Manville, and one can only pray that just a little of her homicidal hillbilly still lingers when she plays Princess Margaret in the final two seasons of The Crown.
THERE is another top-notch cast in Come Away, which stars Angelina Jolie, David Oyelowo, Michael Caine, Derek Jacobi, Anna Chancellor, Clarke Peters and Gugu Mbatha-Raw. But sadly, it’s a mostly misbegotten affair, hamstrung not so much by some decidedly wooden acting (as it’s nearly Christmas, i’ll mention no names) as by a whimsical premise that simply doesn’t work.
The idea is that Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland were mixedrace siblings, although it is not colour but class that looms large in Brenda Chapman’s well-meaning muddle of a movie, set in a Victorian england by turns sundappled (when in the country) and sooty (when in the city).
Oyelowo plays Jack Littleton, blighted by his lower- class Cockney origins in his marriage to posh Rose (Jolie). Although her snobbish sister eleanor (Chancellor) makes much of this perceived social mismatch, the couple seem to enjoy a gilded existence raising their lovely children, David (Reece yates), Peter (Jordan A. Nash) and Alice (Keira Chansa).
But then tragedy strikes. David, the eldest, drowns, and terrible grief propels Jack back into his destructive old habits of gambling and consorting with the London underworld, while Rose seeks solace in the bottle. So it is left to Peter and Alice to cheer things up by continuing their transformation into characters we recognise as the timeless literary creations of J.M. Barrie and Lewis Carroll.
All this is clearly meant to be enchanting, especially for children, but the paradox of a film meant to celebrate the power of imagination is that it’s frankly difficult to imagine any audience properly buying into it.
ONE Night in Miami is another exercise in whimsy, ‘inspired by true events’ but reliant on the
fiction that on the famous night in 1964 when Cassius Clay (Eli Goree), as he still was, beat Sonny Liston to become world heavyweight boxing champion, he ended up in a motel room, discussing the state of the nation — and specifically, the state of the Nation of Islam — with three other African-American icons, all with personal issues to ponder too.
They were civil-rights firebrand Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), soul singer Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr) and American football legend Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge).
The film is inspired by a 2013 play by Kemp Powers and adapted by Powers himself, but director Regina King makes no real attempt to conceal its theatrical roots. That might be acceptable if more of the conversation rang true.
How much of it is the original stage dialogue I don’t know, because I haven’t seen the play, but to my ear it repeatedly sounds forced, as clumsy and flat- footed as Liston himself was made to look that night in the ring.
Not all the action unfolds in the motel. Early on, we see Brown visiting the home of a rich, white Southern patriarch ( Beau Bridges), who is delighted to see him and drinks lemonade happily with him on the porch.
Then the man’s granddaughter very improbably interrupts their genial chat to ask grandaddy to move some furniture indoors. Brown offers to help him do so and the Bridges character tells him curtly that he is not allowed in the house.
Of course, Sixties racism in America was iniquitous, deplorable and endemic, but this film, unhelpfully, makes a cartoon of it.
In another example, the men crave something to eat in the motel room but all that’s available is ice- cream. And guess what? It’s vanilla. ‘How’s that for irony?’ says Cooke. Pretty darned scripted, I’d say.
It’s a great shame, because British actor Ben-Adir, in particular, is terrific as Malcolm X, and there is plenty of good dialogue along with the bad. Cinematically, though, One Night In Miami is no knockout.
Let Him Go and Come Away are in cinemas from today. One Night In Miami is currently scheduled for a cinema release on Boxing Day, and will also be available on Amazon Prime Video from mid- January.