"Let Him Go" -- Movie Review

 

 

This week, Film At Lincoln Center held an advance screening of the new Focus Features crime drama, “Let Him Go”, starring Kevin Costner and Diane Lane.

Synopsis

When a treacherous family absconds with a couple’s grandson, can they safely rescue him?

Story

After their adult son’s accidental death, Margaret and George Blackledge (Lane & Costner) go into an understandably prolonged period of mourning.  Their now-widowed daughter-in-law Lorna (Kayli Carter) continues to live with them on their Montana ranch with her baby son, Jimmy.  Eventually, Lorna meets and marries a mysterious stranger named Donnie Weboy (Will Brittain).  Donnie moves them into an apartment where Margaret comes to find out that he is abusive of both his new wife and her grandson. 

One day, Margaret heads over to the apartment to visit her grandson, only to learn that the family has abruptly moved out.  Getting a tip that Donnie’s family is located in North Dakota, Margaret and George, a retired law enforcement professional, pack up their station wagon and head out to locate The Weboys.  As they gradually hone in on the family, Margaret and George slowly deduce that The Weboys are rather notorious in this state; this only causes their anxiety to heighten over concern for the welfare of their grandson.

Upon finally tracking down The Weboy clan, Margaret and George find them to be a creepy and dangerous tribe.  Although they have welcomed little Jimmy into their family, Margaret and George believe that their grandson will not be well-treated there.  Secretively, they meet with Lorna to plot how to get her and Jimmy back to their home in Montana.  Plans go awry when The Weboys get wind of the plan and torture The Blackledges, causing George to be hospitalized.  It becomes quickly evident that local law enforcement won’t be terribly helpful here because they too are afraid of The Weboys.  Determined to save their grandson, can Margaret and George get the boy out of their clutches?   

Review

“Let Him Go” tries to be something of a combination between a family drama and a crime drama; its success as a crime drama comes only in the third act of the movie which succeeds in a tremendous degree of building tension.  It’s self-sabotaged in the second act, which plods along at a snail’s pace.  The film comes in at just under two hours, but would have been greatly helped by some editing in that second act.  Normally, the second act is supposed to be about, “What are the bad guys doing?”.  Instead, the second act of “Let Him Go” asks the question, “What are the good guys doing?”, which is much less interesting. 

The long-standing rule in movies is “if you show a gun in the first act, you had better use it by the third act”.  “Let Him Go” certainly adheres to this rule, in spades.  (And apropos of absolutely nothing, one might expect that there were not too many creative brain cells burned coming up with that title)  What may begin as an almost contemplative, genteel film turns out to stir up a great deal of blood lust by the end; given how “Let Him Go” was set up, you don’t see the mayhem of its end coming – which, by the way, is not necessarily a criticism.  It’s just that the motion picture could have capitalized on that a bit more.

Following the screening, there was a Zoom interview with the film’s writer-director Thomas Bezucha.  “Let Him Go” was based on a novel by Larry Watson; Bezucha said that he found a copy of the book at a local Barnes & Noble book store in Manhattan; being somewhat familiar with the author’s work, he decided to take a chance on the book and felt it would make a good movie.  He acknowledged one of the observations by others, which is that his motion picture is somewhat reminiscent of the John Ford classic, “The Searchers”, to which he gave a bit of a homage in one scene.  Although the story takes place in Montana and North Dakota in the early 1960’s, it was actually shot in Calgary, Canada due to the tax breaks they received.