There’s a certain giddiness to Bezucha hurtling from a buttoned up A-movie to a balls-out B-movie, as if he can finally just breathe and as Let Him Go lets go, in a furious finale, my only quibble was that I wanted a bit more of the mayhem that takes centre stage, too much too late almost. While she can’t quite convince with a comically uneven accent, she’s so electric to watch that it doesn’t really matter, and it’s her fierce, full-throated performance that thrusts the film into its ferocious last act. Like all good villains, she’s used minimally, and in just a few scenes, Manville yanks the film out of the hands of her higher-wattage co-stars, devouring her prickly dialogue while amplifying her room-stopping death stare from Phantom Thread tenfold – and then some. Too often, women who lose children on screen are painted as deranged while men get to be stoic, so it’s refreshing to see this tired and sexist cliche upended, and Lane, whose acting can often be a little mechanical, rises to the challenge with a commanding, often fiery, performance.īut it’s only when the pair meet their final destination that things get really juicy, facing off against the film’s boss-level foe: an unlikely doozy of a role for Manville, the result of a Hollywood bump from her recent Oscar nomination, styled like a faded 50s bombshell with a bite that’s as bad as her bark. What’s most interesting about the couple’s dynamic is how Lane takes the lead, the active to Costner’s passive, driven not only by a mother’s love but also a righteous anger. The simplicity of their quest (get him back) and the straightforward propulsion of the first act makes it hard not to get at least moderately involved even if the specifics of the predicament are less easily explained (the amount of times Lane has to detail that it’s the boy of the remarried wife of their dead son they’re looking for becomes drinking-game worthy). For the most part, there’s an earnest, old-fashioned sturdiness to writer-director Thomas Bezucha’s tale, anchored by the reliable, old-shoes pairing of Lane and Costner, who last parented in 2013’s Man of Steel.
Underneath the slick studio surface, there’s something compellingly discordant about Let Him Go, as one might expect from a violent thriller brought to the screen by the guy who made The Family Stone and Monte Carlo. The pair are then propelled on the road, led by Margaret, all the way to Donnie’s notorious Weboy family, led by the fearsome matriarch Blanche (Lesley Manville), who won’t, you know, let him go without a fight. Her new husband Donnie (Will Brittain) is brisk and short-tempered, and without warning, he takes both Lorna and her son, George and Margaret’s grandson, away. But when their son gets killed in an accident and their daughter-in-law Lorna (Kayli Carter) remarries, they’re forced into a difficult position. It’s the story of married couple George (Kevin Costner) and Margaret (Diane Lane) who live a contented, quiet life on their Montana ranch. It’s not that the set-up of the film, an adaptation of Larry Watson’s bestselling 60s-set novel, isn’t engaging in itself, it’s just so rooted in dusty Oscar-bait tropes that we don’t expect it to go so drastically from mild to wild, from prestige to pulp, to distinguish itself as something other than been-here-seen-that Sunday afternoon viewing.
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