They're grandparents on a mission

 

     Let Him Go tells a Western story that might have gone down more easily had it taken place during the 1800s. Set in the 1960s, Let Him Go challenges credibility while setting up a battle between two iron-willed women, a mother played  by Diane Lane and an evil matriarch portrayed by Lesley Manville.

    Cut from the same mold as the nail-spitting mother Jacki Weaver portrayed in Australia's Animal Kingdom (2010), Manville's Blanche Weboy spits venom as the head of a clan of North Dakotan miscreants who terrorize the area in which they live.

    But before we get to the Weboys, we meet Lane's Margaret Blackledge and Kevin Costner's George Blackledge,  a salt-of-the-earth Montana couple who tend to their ranch and can be counted on to do the right thing.

    The story kicks off when the couple's son is killed by a bucking horse he's trying to break. Three years later, Lorna (Kayli Carter), the son's widow and mother of the Blackledge's grandson, remarries. Her new husband (Will Brittain) has the word jerk written all over him. 

      Brittain’s Donnie Weboy insists that Lorna move with him to  North Dakota. Donnie wants to rejoin the Weboy clan. He expects Lorna's son to be raised as a Weboy, which means the kid will grow up to be a mean-spirited bully with no respect for anything but brute force.

    Margaret and George understand that their grandson faces a rough time because Margaret saw Donnie slap the kid around and subject Lorna to the same treatment. On top of that, Donnie Weboy never allowed Lorna and her son even to say goodbye.

     Properly aggrieved, the grandparents set out to retrieve the boy and save him from the Weboys. 

    Lane's Margaret takes the lead with Costner's George reluctantly agreeing. A retired sheriff, George has mostl  quit  drinking. He approaches life as if emotions were treasures  meant to be hoarded not spent. 

    Director Thomas Bezucha, adapting a novel by Larry Watson, wisely keeps the lid on the melodramatic material, which employs flashbacks to show us a key moment when George had to put down Margaret's favorite horse, thus proving that the Blackledges could tough out just about anything.

    On the road, the Blackledges meet a Native American man (Booboo Stewart) who ran away from a school where he was abused and deprived of his cultural heritage and who later will be jammed into the plot.

    It's possible to abide just about everything about the movie -- its stern view of the West and its unrelenting starkness. And it's refreshing to see a drama in which Lane's determination plays against her husband's vacillations. 

   But Buezucha ultimately submits to big-screen dictates, turning his movie into a full-scale battle that's as vicious as Manville's character.

     Let Him Go plunges into violence as George seeks to rescue his grandson and daughter-in-law and avenge a monstrous act of cruelty the Weboys inflicted on him. Yes, I had to look away from the screen.

     It might have been easier to suspend disbelief had the movie been a totally committed act of dramatic minimalism. But a violent finale inevitably arrives, raising questions about whether  this helping of true grit wants to be taken more seriously than it deserves.

A Maine town that's far from idyllic

A fishing town provides the setting for a nice helping of New England noir in Blow the Man Down.

No, the above photo does not show two people getting rid of infectious material gathered from a coronavirus hot spot.

It’s a photo from Blow the Man Down, a little helping of noir that will be available on Amazon starting Friday, March 20, and which could provide welcome diversion in these days of maniacal, single-minded focus on ... well ... you don't need me to tell you what has all our attention.

Set in Maine, Blow the Man Down marks the debut of directors Danielle Krudy and Bridget Savage who join the ranks of those who have attempted to expose the myths about the idyllic nature of small-town life, in this case, a fishing village where something fishy (actually many things fishy) seem to be happening.

The directors use a small chorus of singing fisherman to punctuate a story that begins at a funeral. Two sisters Sophie Lowe and Morgan Saylor are bidding farewell to their mother. Lowe’s Priscilla has been devoted to helping her mom and dutifully wants to take over her mother’s fish market.

Saylor’s Mary Beth, the younger of the two siblings, simply wants to get out of town.

Irate when she learns that their mother left a pile of debt, Mary Beth storms off for a spitefully drunken evening. At a local bar, she meets a guy (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) who soon will wind up dead, a condition we're led to believe he richly deserves.

No fair revealing more because Krudy and Savage, who also wrote the screenplay, fill the story with surprising (if not entirely shocking) twists as they bring a variety of townsfolk into focus.

Margo Martindale portrays the sly and powerful Enid Nora Devlin, the woman who runs the town’s bead and breakfast, which happens to be a brothel. Gayle Rankin appears as one of the young women who works for Enid. Will Brittain has a nice turn as the local cop who’s trying to get to the bottom of the story's foul proceedings.

June Squibb, Annette O’Toole and Marceline Hugot play three women who know everyone’s history and who form a kind of court in this Irish-American community. These actresses instantly convince us that their characters have known each other forever and understand the social calculus that keeps the town afloat.

The performances are all spot-on, and Krudy and Savage add enough New England atmospherics to create the right amount of chill. Oddball noir easily can get off track. To its credit, Blow the Man Down never derails.

A college party movie set in Texas

Director Richard Linklater transitions from Boyhood to college in a movie about partying student athletes.

Director Richard Linklater will be 56 in July. Although he's drifting past middle age, the Austin-based director still seems intrigued by youth, perhaps because it's a period when characters are able to test life's waters and try on different styles.

Linklater spent 12 years working on the masterful Boyhood. Now, he's taking aim at adolescence -- albeit of a particular kind, that of college baseball players at a small Texas school during the early 1980s.

Everybody Wants Some!! takes place during the several days before classes begin; the movie's ballplayers drink, look for sexual adventures and jockey for position in the ramshackle house where they've taken up residence.

It's possible that if anyone but Linklater had made the loosey/goosey Everybody Wants Some!!, it would have been greeted with shrugs, a patchy attempt to chart what happens when an 18-year-old jock (Blake Jenner of Glee fame) arrives at fictional Southeastern Texas State for what he hopes will be a great career as a pitcher.

Equipped with a winning smile, Jenner's Jake easily finds a place among his teammates, crude and raucous ballplayers who might be '80s extensions of the frat boys from Animal House.

A bit more sensitive than his teammates, Jake eventually establishes a relationship with a theater major (Zoey Deutch).

But Jake also joins his new pals as they try various party modes -- from disco to punk, all set to a strong and nostalgic soundtrack that includes work by The Knack, Patti Smith, Jermain Jackson, Dire Straits, Devo and The Cars.

Standouts in the baseball playing group include Finn (Glen Powell), a pipe smoking student with a relaxed, know-it all manner, and Willoughby (Wyatt Russell), a stoner who proudly sets the record for the school's longest and deepest bong hit.

Willoughby occasionally philosophizes in the manner of the Linklater characters who populated his hang-out movie, Dazed and Confused, which was set during the 70s.

To the movie's credit, Linklater's characters don't exactly qualify as stock figures.

Tyler Hoechlin portrays McReynolds, the cockiest athlete, a power hitter who disdains pitchers and treats them as a lower order of being.

J. Quinton Johnson appears as the team's only black player, a second baseman.

There's also a good-ole country boy (Will Brittain), a young man who looks like he might have skills, but who could evolve into the kind of player who dribbles the juice from chewing tobacco down the front of his jersey.

I've still got enough adolescent in me to have chuckled as Linklater works his way through his plotless helping of dudes in search of a movie but having too good a time to care if they actually find one.

A couple of Linklater's observations are worth noting -- the way these young men turn nearly anything into a competition, for example.

But for the most part, Everybody Wants Some!! is a shambling, rambling look at young people who have yet to become interesting. Judging by the movie, they may never actually achieve that status.

Pointedly, the movie -- which shows very little baseball -- concludes on the first day of classes with Blake and another teammate (Temple Baker) falling asleep moments after the professor arrives. It's meant as a comment, I suppose, but it's not exactly one that shakes off the movie's party-hardy cobwebs.