Thomas Bezucha’s Let Him Go, released in an ill-omened November of 2020, is a film awhirl in the eddies of a different era. Its setting (postwar North Dakota), stars (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane), budget (estimated $21 million) and genre (western) are all signifiers of an erstwhile epoch, when idols opened westerns with salient critiques to wide audiences. But when did being out of fashion ever stop something from being trenchant?
Costner plays a retired sheriff and new grandfather, George Blackledge, living on a ranch in Montana in the early 1960s. Diane Lane plays Margaret Blackledge, a former broncobuster now devoted to her duties as a grandmother. The Blackledge’s only child, James (Ryan Bruce), dies from a horse fall before title credits. A nifty temporal cut flashes forward a few years; the grandchild, Jimmy, is now a toddler, George and Margaret are still in mourning and Jimmy’s mother, Lorna (Kayli Carter), is remarrying to Donnie Weboy (Will Brittain). Not long after, Margaret furtively sees Donnie hit both Jimmy and Lorna. On her subsequent trip to confront Donnie, Margaret finds that the family has absconded from their modest apartment, appurtenances and all. After finding they’ve moved back with Donnie’s family in North Dakota, Margaret enlists George to visit their grandson and perhaps convince Lorna to move back with them. On the trek, they hear more about the treachery of the Weboy clan. (The family name, retained from Larry Watson’s 2013 source novel, is a delicious bit of fictive brinksmanship, conjuring up a horrific mix of WeWork and Proud Boys.) These rumors are all confirmed when they finally head to the Weboy croft in Gladstone, ND, where they meet the dictatorial matriarch, Blanche (Leslie Manville). The two families then square off over the fate of Lorna and her boy.
Let Him Go is tinged with aspirations toward the classical, a style rarely in vogue. Costner and Lane, for example, give what one might call classically proficient performances with subtle gestures but vocally robust, tempered emotions that are never illegible. More importantly, they both possess the gravitas to dampen the knock-back of awkward script lines (of which there are a few). And, like many classical westerns, Let Him Go is situated on an established motif: the ethical impasse. Does taking their grandson by force offer a better life than letting him go from their lives? Is your way of life better than another person’s? These are question the film reckons with, mostly through Costner, Lane and an indigenous character (duly played by Booboo Stewart). However, this moral quandary parlays into the real thematic flourish of Let Him Go — namely, how Jimmy and Lorna’s (a proxy for the generation of listless twenty-somethings) reduction to objects — to be fought over by the Blackledges and the Weboys — insinuates the current intergenerational relation between homestead-and-healthcare-having sexagenarians and their finance-less and peripatetic offspring.
Lorna has few job or housing prospects and seemingly little say in her future — she is merely an objective. In point of fact, the final section plays out like a heist film where the Blackledges must steal the Weboy family’s most prized possession: not a valuable or family heirloom but objects (Lorna and Jimmy) that can further the family line. The Blackledges only fair a bit better in their treatment of Lorna. Margaret is so mulish about her reclamation of Jimmy (and Lorna to a lesser extent) that it dilutes her altruistic posturing. While Let Him Go makes it clear that Lane and Costner offer a better life for Lorna and Jimmy, they’re mission may be pyrrhic. Suffice to say neither family adheres to the titular advice of letting go.
The reduction of individuals to objects is rightly about as unfashionable as a pleather rhinegrave. Objectification has long been inveighed by a wide spectrum of thinkers: feminist film theorists and scholars, critical race theorists, and 20th century phenomenologists. Usually a film that reduces a character to an object, particularly a female, opens it up to justifiable criticism. But in Let Him Go, the conceit is proffered as an image of the world, not as a metaphor — its exactness woven into our social meshwork. As a concept, this is both subtle and cutting while being a brazen critique for a contemporary American studio film. In that way, Let Him Go gestures towards a lineage of socially conscious westerns such as William Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1942), Allan Dwan’s Silver Lode (1954) and John Ford’s Sergeant Rutledge (1960). While Bezucha’s movie is nowhere close to reaching those heights, it provides, like those films, a progressive conceptualization of contemporary society from within a conservative milieu.
There’s an argument to be had about whether Let Him Go’s main concept was a thematic intention or fortunate byproduct. (If it is the latter, then the entire ethical configuration of the film should be called into question.) The impression could come directly from Watson’s novel, which I haven’t read, or it could have been fully intended. However, there are few hitches that belie the intentionality. Mainly, Bezucha’s direction never achieves the classical style he’s attempting. His camera is tetchy and unsure and the frames rarely express meaningful connections to the image. Other than a few striking panoramas and some symbolic character positioning, his style feels like looking at a digital photo of a Greek statue — there’s classical in there somewhere. Due to a dearth of visual proficiency the heft of Let Him Go’s innovative conceit is conveyed in dialogue and gestures. To that point, Bezucha proves to be excellent with an older crop of actors. Lane is marvelous, suggesting a steamrolling resolve that is often a source of self-reproach. Costner, not always a delicate performer, plays off Lane well, using his stoic garble to be the voice of reason. Of the Gladstonians, Manville fires off a constant salvo of tobacco-tongued line readings and Jeffrey Donovan affixes his face into a perpetual slick smile that undermines all his verbal niceties. Yet, the younger actors seem a bit lost, with today’s de rigueur naturalism seeming out of place with the tone and setting. Kayli Carter’s gestures blare like klaxons next to Lane’s restrained but potent glances. That said, Carter’s inability to seem real or naturalistic only limns her character’s inability to endure the changing world. Her inapposite spirit suggests the Sisyphean task of moving from objecthood back to subjecthood. To Bezucha’s credit, the discordant acting styles only embolden the social rift upon which those intergenerational relationships sit.
A shifting generational backdrop is not the only fresh territory that Let Him Go is set on. Recent attempts to revivify the western, call it the neo-western if you like, have more frequently taken place in the northern Great Plains. Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas are the setting for Bezucha’s film, Wind River (2017), The Rider (2017), Logan (2017) and the popular series Yellowstone (2018-present). Many of these, in particular the North Dakota-set films (Let Him Go, Logan and the 2007 horror film The Messengers) are prone to gussying up the flat plains topography in favor of either tree-laden vistas or mountainous countryside. Erroneous geography aside, there’s something to the relocation of the contemporary western to the Great Plains. The vast slats of open land, sparse populations and natural resource booms hearken back to a classical period of oaters. Unlike many neo-westerns, which bandy hollow notions of “civilization” that play out on the film’s surface, Let Him Go runs a classical plot through a refined image of modern society. It gambles being considered nostalgic and old-fashioned to suture two common western themes (the desire to pass down a better world and the idea that a certain way of life is ending) across a generational divide. The result is a film about parents trying to preserve a world that their children no longer have entrée to — an idea certainly not out of fashion.
Thomas Quist (@ThomasQuist) is a writer and filmmaker from the Midwest.