Movie Breakdown: Let Him Go (Noah)
Pre-Screening Stance:
Aside from the most generic of titles (I have in the course of titling this review written: Let It Go, Let Him In, Let The Right One In, Let It Be, etc.) and a director whose biggest work to date is The Family Stone – this film looks right up my alley. Gravel-voiced Kevin Costner, Diane Lane in all her hard-assed goodness, a family of frontier degenerates – oh, so excited.
Post-Screening Ramble:
Let Him Go isn’t the revenge film it wants to be. Or it doesn’t want to be a revenge film or a vigilante justice film, and it isn’t. It’s a film about two parents who’ve lost a son to a freak accident and all they have left is his widow and their son. And when the son is taken by the widow’s abusive new husband’s family, the older couple – Diane Lane and Kevin Costner playing house like they actually have been married for the last forty years – go on a mission to find the last remaining link. This is a Western in the slow, meditative vein. It is a film about grieving and loss and what we do to hold on to the memories of our loved ones. It’s a gorgeous film, glacially paced in the best way, and if you’re in on late-era, Kevin-Costner-with-the-Doc-Rivers-voice, this is your jam. Costner plays stoic cowboy here, and he plays it well, settling nicely into the roll his entire career was aimed towards. But the film is Diane Lane’s. A fiery horse-breaking ass-kicker, Diane Lane is the heat in this film, the scenery-chewing protagonist you know to keep an eye on. When her and Lesley Manville (fantastic as the horrible matriarch of the Weboy Clan) square off in a kitchen, you worry the whole place might combust. This is not a revenge film, it’s a film about loss punctuated by shocking moments of violence. There’s no doubt that everything is going to go off the rails at some point (and it does, in a deliciously restrained bloodbath) but the journey to the end with Lane and Costner as your guides is what makes the film. And what a film it is.
One Last Thought:
Jeffrey Dononvan has the face of someone you want to punch. And it is used to great effect in this film. Dude is a creeper of the highest order. Come for Costner and Lane, cringe at Donovan.
