National Post (National Edition)
TOO SLOW, NOT ENOUGH BURN
DIANE LANE AND KEVIN COSTNER PROVIDE SIMMER FACTOR IN ODDLY COMPELLING THRILLER
Cast: Kevin Costner, Diane Lane, Lesley Manville Director: Thomas Bezucha
Duration: 1 h 54 m
Le t 's get one thing out of the way first: No, Superman's adoptive parents didn't have another child. Kevin Costner and Diane Lane were last on the screen together as Martha and Jonathan Kent, goodhearted rural Americans living in Kansas in Man of Steel and Dawn of Justice. Here they play Margaret and George Blackledge, goodhearted rural Americans living in Montana. Completely different!
In writer-director Thomas Bezucha's slow-burn thriller Let Him Go, set in the 1960s and adapted from the 2013 novel by Larry Watson, the Blackledges' son James dies in the opening scene. James's widow Lorna (Kayli Carter) then remarries Donnie Weboy (Will Brittain), who soon proves to be an abusive husband and a bad father to her three-year-old son Jimmy. This all takes a little longer to tell than it should, what with the glacial camerawork and the mournful score. It's too slow, not enough burn.
But things heat up when the newlyweds up and vanish. Word is they've moved in with Donnie's family in neighbouring North Dakota.
Margaret, fearing for the safety of her grandson, decides to seek them out with the notion of bringing the child back to live with her. George, an ex-sheriff, grumpily agrees to accompany her.
It's lucky she has him as backup. When they finally find the infamous Weboy clan, its chief representative is Bill Weboy (Jeffrey Donovan), practically sweating malice. And the town — Gladstone,
N.D. — sounds like the kind of place where shots are exchanged in the main street at high noon.
But it gets worse — or, from a movie-going perspective, better — at the clan's rural homestead, an off-thegrid shack presided over by Blanche Weboy.
This sinister matriarch is played by Lesley Manville, one of those getting-better-as-she-gets-older actors (she's 64), really sinking her teeth into the role. Blanche has clearly had to fight hard all her hardscrabble life, and that struggle has left her fierce as a polecat and tough as leather. Sure, Margaret has her steely side, but it's no match.
Bezucha knows how to shoot tense meetups for maximum, stomach-knotting suspense, which is all the more surprising when you consider his brief list of directing credits comprises lighthearted fare like 2005's The Family Stone and 2011's girls-trip movie Monte Carlo.
But when things calm down, Let Him Go tends to go a bit slack, relying on its on-the-nose score for emotional heavy lifting. And there's an odd subplot featuring a lonely Indigenous kid (Booboo Stewart), whose tale of running away from residential school is heartbreaking but also feels out of place in the story we're watching.
In the end, the movie's good points outweigh the bad. It helps that Costner and Lane have a shared cinematic history and some honest-to-goodness chemistry. In one scene, after visiting their son's gravesite, George offers this sad bit of wisdom to his wife: “Sometimes that's all life is, Margaret: a list of what we've lost.”
Let Him Go see-saws uneasily between such wistful moments and heart-pounding thrills. It's an odd mix, but it works. •••