Weekend Watch: Let Him Go

Kevin Costner and Diane Lane are on a Taken-style mission in 1960s Montana and North Dakota

Welcome to the latest edition of Weekend Watch, in which I recommend (or occasionally warn against) movies or TV shows I’ve been checking out. This week, Kevin Costner and Diane Lane are a couple on a mission.

The last time Kevin Costner and Diane Lane shared the screen as a couple, they were Jonathan and Martha (why did you say that name?) Kent in Man Of Steel, certainly one of the better elements of that film. Now they’re reunited as a similarly strong-willed pair for Thomas Bezucha’s Let Him Go, which adapts Larry Watson’s novel.

It’s the story of homespun marrieds George and Margaret Blackledge, a retired sheriff and his horse–trainer wife, who are happily, quietly living their lives on their farm alongside son James (Ryan Bruce), daughter-in-law Lorna (Kayli Carter) and their baby grandson. Yet when James is killed in an accident with a horse and Lorna remarries (to sullen Donnie Weboy, played by Will Brittain), the Blackledges face losing contact with both Lorna and baby Jimmy. Cut to a few years later, and Margaret witnesses Donnie’s flagrant spousal and child abuse and decides that she’s going to rescue Lorna and Jimmy from his family.

Let Him Go is a film of two halves. Costner makes for a typically gruff patriarch, circumspect and loyal, while Lane shows a spine of steel as Margaret. Watching them interact as a pair, and with their family, is like a warm embrace, a quiet family drama fuelled by love and respect. Unfortunately, that’s only about a third of the running time. When the Blackledges head out on their mission, they at one point have to make a sharp right turn on their journey to the Weboy homestead. At the same time, the film makes its own turn into thriller territory, and it’s one that, like the couple’s interacting with the Weboy clan, doesn’t work well. 

It’s no fault of Jeffrey Donovan as family enforcer Bill Weboy or Lesley Manville as matriarch Blanche, who both put fill their roles with power and nuance, at least as much as the script allows. But as the story unfolds, and it becomes clear that George and Margaret won’t be getting their grandchild and daughter-in-law back without a fight, the story takes a dive. The violence is not unexpected, but it also signals the film veering into such bleak territory that it sours what has come before. And a side plot of the Blackledges befriending a young Native American (Booboo Stewart’s Peter Dragswolf) rarely offers much of a narrative through-line, ending up more in a deus ex machina situation. 

That the film leaves a bad taste in the mouth is made all the sourer by the watchable early going, and the cast is able to, for the most part, rise above it. But if you’re after something positive and heartwarming, you might want to head on over into other territory, stranger.

Let Him Go is in Stateside cinemas now and arrives in the UK on 4 December.