Let Him Go - 2020 film review

Let Him Go is an uneven but very watchable film starring Kevin Costner and Diane Lane as grandparents desperate to restore contact with their grandson. This has the makings of a weepie or perhaps a socially conscious drama but the film, based on a novel by Larry Watson, is rather more ambitious. There are some langourous moments but there's plenty of action in the later stages, some of it quite shocking.

At first, the Blackledges seem to lead an idyllic life. George (a low-key but impressive Costner) is a retired sheriff, happily married to the forceful Margaret (Lane). Their son James is married to Lorna (Kayli Carter) and they have a small child, Jimmy. But then James dies in a tragic riding accident. Lorna remarries but her new husband Donnie Weboys is cut from different cloth and it's soon apparent that he's violent towards both his wife and step-son.

One day, Lorna and her new family vanish. Margaret is determined to get her grandson back. At this point, you might wonder whether her behaviour and sense of entitlement is over the top. Grandparents' rights tend to be under-valued by society, but George's anxiety about her plans is understandable - and it's reinforced when he discovers that she has brought a gun with her....

To say to much about what follows would be unfair. Suffice to say that Lesley Manville gives a truly memorable, if perhaps over-the-top, performance as a matriarch you really don't want to mess with. There are flaws in this film, but the quality of the acting is a major asset, as is the evocative rural camera work.     

JFK

A good conspiracy thriller can be highly entertaining. I’ve mentioned before my enthusiasm for films such as Capricorn One and The Parallax View. And one of the greatest conspiracy theories in the real world concerns the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, so it’s a wonder that it’s taken me so long to get round to watching Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK. But at last I’ve watched it.

The film won a couple of Oscars, and it’s notable for an excellent cast. Kevin Costner plays Garrison, an attorney who decides that JFK was victim of an establishment plot, and his performance is very powerful. His wife is played by Sissy Spacek, and other stellar names are Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Tommy Lee Jones, Gary Oldman, Donald Sutherland and Ed Asner. The soundtrack is written by the excellent John Williams. All very impresive.

I am not familiar with the detail of the various theories about Kennedy’s murder, and my understanding is that, although Garrison was indeed a real-life crusader for the truth about the killing, there is an element (some would say, a large element) of fiction in Stone’s version of the story.

This is a very long film indeed, and I have to admit that, despite my admiration for Costner, there were a number of times when my attention wandered. I may not know the truth about the case, but more importantly, I’m not sure that Oliver Stone does. There were moments when I did feel almost as if I were being repeatedly coshed by an angry person, determined to hammer his ideas into my head. I wasn’t anticipating such a test of endurance. Overall, JFK seemed to me to be a film with genuine merit, but by no means the masterpiece I’d hoped for. Maybe my expectations were just too high, maybe I wasn't in quite the right mood for it. But I do think that it would have appealed to me more had it been about an hour shorter.

Mr Brooks

Serial killer movies are two-a-penny, but a film starring Kevin Costner, William Hurt and Demi Moore cannot easily be dismissed as run-of-the-mill, and I found Mr Brooks, a 2007 film, to be a cut above most movies featuring sociopaths, benefiting from a complex plot which is nevertheless not so convoluted as to be incomprehensible.

Costner plays the eponymous Mr Brooks. He is a rich, successful and popular businessman with a gorgeous blonde wife and lovely daughter at college, but he is also a recovering serial killer who (in a scene that I didn’t find wholly convincing) even turns up at an AA meeting and announces himself as suffering from an unspecified addiction.

It’s two years since Mr Brooks last killed, but he’s getting the urge again, prompted by his mysterious alter ego, played by William Hurt – whom nobody else can see or hear. Hurt is one of my favourite actors. He never seems to play a character who is wholly likeable, but even at his nastiest, he is very watchable, with a trademark sly wit. He encourages Mr Brooks to kill a pair of lovers – but the crime is spotted by a creepy voyeur, who decides that he wants Mr Brooks to induct him into the world of psychotic murder. To add to the complications, the cop who is pursuing Mr Brooks is herself being pursued by a killer bent on revenge, while her own divorce leads quite literally to murder. And if that’s not enough, it seems that Mr Brooks’ daughter wants to follow in Dad’s footsteps….

Blimey. There’s enough material in all that for three movies. Of course, Mr Brooks is preposterous. But it’s very well done, and the stars do a great job that enabled me to suspend my disbelief for the best part of two hours.