![]() ![]() Especially as projected by the great Lesley Manville, who-in a bouffant caressed by cigarette smoke-has a fabulous time playing the Weboys’ domineering, wicked matriarch, Blanche. The Weboys of Let Him Go are much less scary than the Stones, but they still have a chilling, down-home mafioso menace. But there’s a pleasure in that efficiency the movie’s blunt task is carried out persuasively by Costner and Lane, and by Bezucha’s measured direction.īezucha is perhaps best known as the writer-director of the Christmas film The Family Stone, about a nightmarish group of solipsists terrorizing a poor unsuspecting woman just trying to spend a holiday with her boyfriend’s folks. It’s a single-service film in that way, pointed at one destination and ending soon after it arrives. ![]() Bezucha stages all this in a steady crescendo as Margaret and George grow closer to Jimmy, the tension coils. Thus starts the mission of the film, as Margaret and George head toward the lion’s den, intent on reclaiming Jimmy-and thus, in the film’s chief psychological argument, some piece of their son. She’s both weary and forceful, a grieving woman narrowing herself into single-minded determination. Lane (who played Superman’s mom to Costner’s dad in Man of Steel) has cut a different figure throughout her career, but she settles into this new role quite well. Playing a laconic retired police officer, Costner wears his gruffness like a uniform, signifying to the Boomers this film is targeted at that they are in reliable hands. Costner might as well have wandered over from the set of his very popular television show Yellowstone, also a story of family struggle out there in the vast lands west of the Mississippi. Those salt-of-the-earth folks are played by Kevin Costner and Diane Lane. ![]() It is, instead, a slim but engaging descent into family ruin, complete with a bullet-strewn finale that casts our heroes as noble invaders. But Let Him Go is nowhere near as emotionally complex as that ravishing tragedy. The film is set in the 1960s, which, when coupled with the big-sky setting, evokes Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, another bitter story of life out on the range during the middle of the last century. Adapting from Larry Watson’s 2013 novel, writer-director Thomas Bezucha steers a story of grief toward a bloody sort of rescue, in which one family proves its ragged purity over the wickedness of a corrupted clan. Which is just what happens in the new film Let Him Go (November 6, in theaters), a pulpy little movie that mixes sorrow with (blessedly brief) sadism. It makes a whole lot of sense, right now, for a family drama set in the American West to be cut through with violence. ![]()
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