Kevin Costner and Diane Lane are sensational in the fine Western thriller Let Him Go, in which they play a retired, small-town Montana cop and headstrong wife who inadvertently run afoul of a nefarious crime family, led by a hardboiled Lesley Manville. As directed by Thomas Bezucha, it is a tough genre exercise with superb performances and elegiac tone. Set a good half-century ago, it does something quite special, and unexpected, in its patient examination of a fissured, leather-worn marriage first strained by enduring resentments, then tested by loss and violence. Let Him Go is a thriller foremost, but the enduring marriage is what you remember when the bloody iniquities of its final reel conclude.
Costner, that perfect fit for any western, and Lane, gracing movies for five decades and stronger with each picture, are George and Margaret Blackledge, who in the film’s opening lose their beloved adult son James (Ryan Bruce) in a tragic horseback accident.
George, retired from the police, and Margaret, once a horse tamer whose primary focus is now young grandson Jimmy (Bram Hornung), are inconsolable. Theirs is a range-dwelling, Norman Rockwell portrait of farmhouse Americana in despair, the kind author Anne Proulx once famously described as “the huge sadness of the northern plains” rolling down on them. And the picture may have been compelling had stuck to an examination of trauma in the heartland. But there is much more.
The opening also sets up the basic marital dilemma—Margaret is exacting and perhaps slightly immutable, as when firmly offering daughter-in-law Lorna (Kayli Carter) parenting tips. Where George recedes, Margaret intervenes; theirs is a bond of mixed temperaments and a few resentments below their handsome veneer.
A few years pass and Lorna seems to have found a replacement father, one Donnie Weboy (Will Brittain), who has a hair-trigger temper and whom Margaret accidentally witnesses striking Jimmy on the street after the child drops his ice cream. Perplexed as to Jimmy’s safety and feeling increasingly unwelcome, they are shocked when Lorna skips town without a goodbye, worried they may never see their grandson again. While George is reluctant and advises Margaret that the law will not support her decision to track the boy down and perhaps bring him back to Montana, they nonetheless hop in their station wagon, eat sandwiches by the side of the interstate and most fear what may be coming.
Up to this point, Costner and Lane have done such a fine job etching their marriage and grave concerns to the child’s well-being we will follow them anywhere, which here means into a dangerously pitch black, Western noir of rising dread. To say they are unprepared for what they will face would be an understatement.
Arriving in North Dakota, they are routed to the isolated Weboy family farm and its callous, hair-trigger crime clan straight out of gothic pulp, a group of mama’s boy brothers led by the hard-as-nails, peroxided, chain-smoking matriarch Blanche (Manville), a provincial, high-plains survivor (in a vivid monologue she details the family’s hard-won settlement history) protected by her villainous sons, there to do her bidding.
In a scene of excruciating tension, George and Margaret intend to visit Jimmy, only to have the child is ripped from them in mere seconds. Forced to sit for dinner, the acting fireworks between Costner, Lane and Manville produce a roaring satisfaction. Lane, especially, delivers in the realization of worst-case scenario they are up against, and for which they are woefully outmatched. No way is Blanche letting little Jimmy go.
This is a fascinating film in unexpected ways, beginning with Lane’s Margaret, who is so headstrong and single-minded that nothing will derail her quest; her maternal grief coupled with the despairing notion that both son and grandson are lost is the engine for the film, and George, deferential, reluctantly follows. Suggested in these exchanges is a lifetime of both lived-in comfort and distance.
This comfort will be tested by the Weboys, who are so callous that they brutalize Lorna for attempting an escape. They do worse after barging into George and Margaret’s motel room, an act of mayhem that proves the catalyst for the picture’s explosive final act.
Lane, aged up here, has over the past few decades grown into a sort of believable weariness (those of us in Chicago saw her perform this beautifully at the Goodman’s Sweet Bird of Youth revival several years back). A star since childhood, she now yields a worldly maturity and gravitas.
In Let Him Go, Bezucha has crafted a film about fate, sacrifice and revenge that serves his actress well, and there is a regal gravitas to her interactions throughout, including a surprising connection with an orphaned young Native American man (Booboo Stewart) with his own troubled past.
The principal pleasure of Let Him Go is the easy comfort and pleasure of its two stars—people we care about—taking their believable, lived-in chemistry through a gauntlet of tension.
3 1/2 stars.
