3.5 stars. Rated PG, for dramatic tension
By Derrick Bang
Some films are anchored by powerful storytelling, others by delicately shaded performances.
This is one of the latter.
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| Hoping to evade well-intentioned welfare agents — and police — who are determined to enforce the structure of a "socially normal" life, Will (Ben Foster) and his daughter Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie) seek a railroad car they can hop, in order to escape the city. |
Leave No Trace is another quietly intimate drama from writer/director Debra Granik, best known for 2010’s Winter’s Bone (which, it must be remembered, “introduced” Jennifer Lawrence to the movie-going public). Although lacking that film’s atmosphere of dangerous intensity, Granik’s newest endeavor — also co-scripted with Anne Rosellini, and adapted from Peter Rock’s 2009 novel, My Abandonment — is no less compelling, with its thoughtfully sensitive depiction of people surviving on society’s margins.
Rock based his novel on a 2004 article in The Oregonian, published after a man and his adolescent daughter were discovered in Portland’s Forest Park, where they had spent four apparently content years in a homemade shelter. Local authorities, sharing conventional society’s wariness of such “fringe” behavior, attempted to “mainstream” the duo; the rational behind such a decision — and its aftermath — shaped both Rock’s book and Granik’s absorbing big-screen adaptation.
Her film can be viewed as a close cousin of 2016’s Captain Fantastic, with its depiction of a stubborn single father attempting to raise his six children under similarly off-the-grid circumstances. But Leave No Trace eschews the flamboyance of a patriarch as charismatic as Oscar-nominated Viggo Mortensen; the relationship here between Will (Ben Foster) and his teenage daughter Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie) is much gentler and understated.
The dynamic also is different. Despite her youth, Tom is equal parts peer and offspring. She’s able to challenge her father, albeit cautiously; he listens, sometimes acquiescing. Even so, he remains a taciturn closed book. If her questions cut too close to the bone, he turns them around.
“What’s your favorite color?” she impulsively asks, during what seems a mutually candid moment.
“What’s yours?” he replies, after a moment of silence.
The film’s captivating first act — beautifully lensed by cinematographer Michael McDonough — depicts what has become a daily survival routine, in this gorgeously carpeted forest setting: the search for edible vegetation; waterproofing repairs to their shelter; the gathering and shaving of wood, for fires over which to cook their meals; the application of clothing and additional blankets, as nighttime temperatures drop. Their adeptness at these many tasks bespeaks considerable experience, and we wonder precisely how much. Months? Years?
It’s not all work. They play chess, Will coaching his daughter in the game’s complexities. They read whatever books come to hand. Tom speaks well, is intelligent and reasonably well-rounded, given the circumstances. When they need basic supplies and provisions, they carefully depart the park and walk into the city, where Will has established a rather novel method of making money.
Their discipline, while shopping, is uncomplaining: an essential distinction between “want” and “need.”
