Let Him Go – Review

Let Him Go

Directed by: Thomas Bezucha

Runtime: 114 minutes

It’s a tale as old as time. Old man and woman lose an adult son. Woman grieves and projects loss onto the surviving grandchild. Lonely widow eventually remarries and leaves. Man and woman now lose a grandchild. Man and woman embark on a cross-country search to recover their last shred of family. Spin this tale with regrets, snow-capped mountain vistas, and the occasional burst of violence, and you have writer and director Thomas Bezucha’s grizzled neo-Western, Let Him Go.

Based on the 2013 novel by Larry Watson, Bezucha’s film centres on retired lawman George Blackledge (Kevin Costner) and his wife Margaret (Diana Lane), who live with their son, James, his wife, Lorna (Kayli Carter), and their newborn grandson, Jimmy, in 1960s rural Montana. When James is suddenly thrown from a horse and tragically killed, time suddenly skips forward three years to show Lorna remarrying the slick Donnie Weboy (Will Brittain), much to George and Margaret’s chagrin.

Things take a sinister turn when Margaret witnesses Donnie brazenly strike both Jimmy and Lorna in public. Before she can confront him or check in on a battered Lorna, the newlyweds flee town and disappear with Jimmy in tow. As Margaret worries for the safety of her young grandchild, she convinces a reluctant George to help her intervene. The pair then set off across the American Northwest to find Donnie and Lorna, eventually running afoul of Donnie’s insular and violently predisposed Weboy clan.

Watching Let Him Go, I realised that my connection to Kevin Costner as an actor had been mediated by the long arc of time. As a wide-eyed child, I watched him protect Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard (1992) and navigate a post-apocalyptic biblical flood in Waterworld (1995). After some time away from the spotlight (due to many box-office disappointments), Costner then popped up on my adult radar once more as Jonathan “Pa” Kent in the middling Man of Steel (2013) and other later DCEU projects. Perhaps his most fitting performance this century has been as cattle rancher mafioso John Dutton in the TV series Yellowstone (2018-present), created by Taylor Sheridan and John Linson. And it’s this highly acclaimed role which allows Costner to bring a sense of stoic gravitas to Bezucha’s film adaptation.

Time is not on the Blackledge’s side. Margaret is so wracked with guilt at not being able to say goodbye to her fallen son that she desperately grips on to Lorna and Jimmy at all costs. She’s fiercely maternal, possessive, and more than a little irritating, but for the audience, this mostly plays out as heartfelt and earnest. George, on the other hand, understands that the couple isn’t getting any younger. The last thing this former sheriff wants to do is something illegal, let alone get between a mother and her child. What motivates the central plot of the film then is the loathsomeness of the Weboy clan and the perpetual danger that they represent to Lorna and Jimmy (and eventually, George and Margaret themselves).

Together, Costner and Lane give standout performances which help to ground the central conflict and narrative tension of the film. Their rural couple dynamic is light-hearted, sweet, and mostly believable, with some very minor exceptions. (Lane is hardly convincing on the saddle as a supposedly sexagenarian horse lover; Costner shoots an aging horse without first digging a hole for the soon-to-be slain animal. Country boy nitpicks, I know.) The couple also enlists the help of a young Native American man, Peter Dragswolf (Booboo Stewart), who was himself the victim of dispossession as a child, a thematic resonance which Bezucha’s script appears to present momentarily without any desire for further interrogation.

Lesley Manville is terrific as the malevolently matriarchal Blanche Weboy, dealing out backhands and acid-tongued one-liners that leave the lingering bad taste of an overflowing ashtray. Jeffrey Donovan is also suitably creepy as the slack-jawed and thinly veiled misogynist, Bill Weboy, who, together with his knuckle-dragging brethren, provides much of the film’s more suspenseful moments, especially towards the third-act finale.

For his part, Bezucha keeps the stakes of the film well-grounded in the gritty realism of the neo-Western and the 1960s period setting. While his direction is mostly reserved and perfunctory—with the occasional visually striking wide shot, or expertly framed thematic signifier—this ultimately works in the film’s favour. This isn’t some high-noon, good versus evil, shoot ‘em up last stand—it’s a by-the-numbers, revenge-action thriller, driven by relatable moral conundrums and human emotional impulses. Think less No Country for Old Men (2007), and more Hell or High Water (2016) and Wind River (2017). While certainly not a genre classic in the making, Let Him Go does tick all the boxes for good ol’ fashioned compelling cinema.