I posted my review Thomas Bezucha‘s Let Him Go (Focus Features, 11.6) on election day. I said I’d wait a week or so before discussing it in greater detail so here goes. Understand that three or four fairly significant SPOILERS follow so please stop reading if you haven’t yet had the pleasure.
To make it easy I’m just going to copy and paste a discussion I had with a colleague…
HE: “Loving Let Him Go — so well composed, exacting, nicely honed. But the bad guys just [performed a violent act upon a major presence] and I really, REALLY didn’t like that. You don’t do that to the laconic, tough-as-nails hero — you just don’t.”
Friendo: “That violent shock scene is one of my favorite things in the film. You’re right — you don’t do that. It’s not done. And that ‘rule’ makes our hero feel implicitly protected.
“That rule-breaking moment raised the stakes. It said: These people are THAT dangerous –— the hero isn’t going to be protected by the usual hero mythology. I thought the horror of that event made what followed more suspenseful, as well as placing [a significant character] on a path toward martyrdom, although we don’t know that yet.
HE: “If you ask me, Kayli Carter is the villain of the piece. She had a good gentle husband (the son of Kevin Costner and Diane Lane) and then, with a young son, she married a violent sociopath (Will Britain). She couldn’t sniff a whiff of trouble from that guy? Any half-intelligent adult could have. Especially with a three-year old to think about.
“Lane, we’re told, was less than supportive after her son died and so Kayli…what, had no choice but to marry the first available psycho who came along?
After all is said and done, that kid is going to be seriously traumatized, probably for the rest of his life. Decades of therapy.
“And of course Lesley Manville and her scurvy, white-trash, seed-of-Satan sons are cut from the same cloth that Trump supporters will come from 50 years hence. OF COURSE they are. Trump yokels + Deliverance + Animal Kingdom (David Michod‘s Australian crime family, released in 2010).
“And why did Kayli rat them out by telling Manville & Sons that Costner/Lane wanted her to move back with them? She knows that awful family is violent and territorial and yet she ratted out Kevin and Diane?
Friendo: “That plotting with the daughter is a weakness; it’s fuzzy. But I don’t think she’s villainous. The implication is that Donnie kept his true nature mostly hidden. (That can happen with abusers.)
“If you want to run with the Trump metaphor, then do — I think it’s interesting, and I don’t think it’s ‘wrong.’ I’m just saying that as someone disposed to hate rural Trumpers, it never occurred to me.”