Kevin Costner and Diane Lane play a husband-and-wife who live on a ranch in rural Americana. Let’s see how far I get in this review before I start bringing up how crap it was last time this happened on film… dammit. Okay, after Costner genuinely blew me away in Molly’s Game, I’m making it a point to stop completely disregarding the man’s abilities, and even in objectively bad productions like Serenity, Lane still manages to deliver. And to their credit, they are the main anchors that keep the story of this film together… but even that comes with some drawbacks.
A family drama with nouveau Western tinges throughout, the story serves as an examination of the connections between family members, both by blood and by circumstance, both for good and for bad. Costner and Lane spend the bulk of the film trying to rescue their former daughter-in-law and their grandson from the Weboy clan, who are basically a secular version of Jesse Custer’s family from Preacher with equal levels of abuse in their makeup. In the process, Thomas Bezucha’s script looks into how grief and abuse can affect those relationships, pitting Lane’s Margaret Blackledge against Weboy matriarch Blanche (Lesley Manville) as an ideological battle between parenting based on the child’s best interests and parenting based on the parent’s interests. Not their best; just maintaining power.
It manages to cover some interesting ideas, but Bezucha’s greenness within a Western setting shows through in how plodding the pace can be, and how jarring some of the developments get. It even turns into an all-out revenge thriller during the last third, feeling like it decided to slam on the accelerator after staying in neutral on a steep hill, not helped by how it attempts to showcase Costner’s thrill cred. I know I said I’d stop giving him a hard time, but when he gets mutilated and it looks like he’s managing to sleep with his eyes open, it cuts into the idea that he’s strong enough to do even a quarter of the shit he does during the finale.
There’s also the disappointingly haphazard way the film tries to meld these tones together, managing to sabotage its own attempts at commentary on family values in the process. With how much grief plays into the Blackledges’ emotional motivations, it almost falls into the realm of “it’s okay when we do it” territory… which, again with the physical abuse and intimidation in mind, sours some of the good intentions behind it all.
To say nothing of the inclusion of Native American Peter (Booboo Stewart), who gestures at some larger commentary about family estrangement and forced assimilation that could’ve given all this a major boost… if the film bothered to do anything with it, other than play into Western revisionist solidarity. It feels out-of-place, and it being out-of-place makes its inclusion rather suspect.
I can’t say that this is a bad film in and of itself, as between (most) of the acting talent, its more heartfelt moments, and the frankly gorgeous depiction of the Southern U.S. landscape, it definitely has merit to it. However, that makes it fall into the realms of unfortunate letdown for me, as all the slapdash narrative progression and lack of thematic connective tissue kept nagging at me that I really should be more into this than I am, my pre-established iffyness with Westerns notwithstanding.
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