A straightforward potboiler – but also a gripping must-see
Let Him Go
15 cert, 114 min
★★★★ ★ Dir Thomas Bezucha Starring Kevin Costner, Diane Lane, Lesley Manville, Jeffrey Donovan, Booboo Stewart, Kayli Carter, Will Brittain
Let Him Go is a western-tinged, slow-burning rescue thriller which could be set almost any time before mobile phones and the internet. As it happens, it takes place in mid-sixties Montana, which gives the film a pictorial resemblance to Brokeback Mountain. But when the film gets down to business, it packs the bereaved couple played by Kevin Costner and Diane Lane into a 1958 Chevy station wagon, leaving their ranch behind to enact a gritty variation on the plot in John Ford’s
The Searchers.
Their grown son has died in a riding accident, leaving his youngster, Jimmy, in the care of the remaining Blackledge family: Margaret (Lane), retired sheriff George (Costner) and their skittish daughter-in-law Lorna (Kayli Carter), whose remarriage three years later threatens the whole arrangement.
Lorna hasn’t just married a new man – sullenly handsome, physically abusive Donnie Weboy (Will Brittain) – but into a shady dynasty, the Weboy family, who rule over their own stretch of the North Dakota prairies like one of those miscreant clans from Ozark.
Jimmy’s future is immediately rewritten as one of scowling misery and petty crime – unless Margaret, who has clearly displaced her grief on to caring for Jimmy like the boy she’s lost, has anything to say about it. The Weboys whisk him away, and she wants him back.
This is some of Lane’s most substantial work since her Oscar nod for 2002’s Unfaithful, and it’s a credit to this film, a straightforward potboiler directed with solid emotive force by Thomas Bezucha, that it recognises the value of flipping gender expectations in a neo-western setting. Racial ones, too – John
Wayne’s Searchers blood feud against the entire Comanche people is certainly not the name of the game.
There’s a nest of vipers awaiting the Blackledges, but it greets them with a calculating veneer of hospitality before rearing up to strike. Blanche (Lesley Manville), a smirking matriarch with four brutish boys under her thumb, lures the Blackledges round for a blackened pork-chop dinner, sans visible veg, and cultivates the kind of atmosphere where “mi casa su casa” could only sound viciously sarcastic.
I couldn’t quite decide how seriously to take Manville’s performance, but it’s certainly not dull. And the final showdown in the Weboys’ grim manor is managed with Clint-eastwood-esque cathartic skill. It’s odd that this mission falls exclusively to George, momentarily forgetting that this has been Lane’s film all along.
Raising it to a must-see, she gets the scope to build a character who’s at once fretful and dead set, clinging on to what she loves, and fully prepared to fight. In cinemas from today