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LEAVE NO TRACE
Director: Debra Granik Cast: Ben Foster, Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie, Jeff, Kober, Dale Dickey MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:49 Release Date: 6/29/18 (limited); 7/6/18 (wider) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 5, 2018 The man has decided to live an isolated life in the woods, and he has taken has daughter with him. In his mind, leaving civilization is the right choice for him, but that doesn't leave any choice for the girl. The father either had to take the daughter with him or leave her behind. It becomes clear that the second option was never really one in the man's mind. He needs her just as much as she needs him. There are moments in Leave No Trace when we think the man has made the correct decision, and there are others when we think he is completely wrong in dragging his daughter, just a teenager at the story's start, away from society to live a sheltered life in the forest of a public park. The wisest move on the part of co-writer/director Debra Granik's film is that it doesn't have an opinion on the matter. It neither lionizes the father's rugged independence nor chastises him for taking away so much from his daughter. Granik and co-screenwriter Anne Rosellini don't take sides, because they're on everyone's side here—the father, the daughter, the government workers who try to help the pair, the various people whom the two encounter while trying to find their place in the world. Everyone here is right in some way, and we also discover, in ways that aren't quite as explicit as in the telling of the father-daughter story, that everyone in the film is trying to find his or her place in this world. It's a story full of lost and wounded souls, and the most anyone can hope for is to find some comfort amidst that reality. Will (Ben Foster) and his 13-year-old daughter Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie) seem to have found some comfort in their lives. The opening of the film, adapted from Peter Rock's novel My Abandonment, shows the two at work in and around their campsite in the woods—gathering food, checking supplies, gathering rain water from a container fed by a tarp. Nothing seems too amiss, since we might as well be watching a father and daughter on a camping trip. This, though, is the extent of their lives, and it has been for some unknown amount of time. Will makes money by selling prescription drugs to a local dealer, who lives in a shanty town nearby in the woods. He gets the drugs from the local VA clinic, and that's our first hint as to why Will has decided to abandon the world with his daughter. Almost all of the important details about these characters—their thinking, their emotional state, their back story—comes in little pieces such as this. By the end, we might understand Will a bit more than he understands himself, and there's something undeniably tragic in that realization. We learn that this isn't the first camp that the two have had. They've had to move at least a few times, because, as much as Will and Tom try to escape civilization, it has a way of getting close to them. Lumberjacks are working in the distance. The occasional jogger makes his or her way down a path near their foraging area. Will has his daughter participate in drills to hide from such threats to their ideal life in the forest. We can almost imagine him starting these drills as a game of hide-and-seek, but Tom is old enough now to know that, if some stranger finds her in her hiding spot, there's a very real possibility that she and her father will be separated. That's more or less how the film's slim plot begins: A jogger spots Tom and, later, calls the police, and the cops find the two hiding in some brush. Tom is sent to a state-run facility for children, and Will undergoes a series of psychological tests. In a lesser movie, we would view these government employees with either scorn or apathy, depending on which side of judging Will's decision the movie falls. They could easily be the villains in a different story, trying to break up a father and his daughter because of legislation or bureaucracy. Instead, we watch them do their work with respect bordering on admiration. It's clear from the few scenes of the workers interacting with Will and Tom that they genuinely want what's best for the two of them. What's best, in their minds, is a trailer-style home on a large farm, where Will takes a job and Tom can go to school (Will had been educating her well enough that she's actually ahead of her grade level). The rest of the film follows the two as they fight to stay together but slowly appearing to separate on their own terms, with Tom finding solace in the company of other people and Will, still haunted by nightmares and feeling uneasy within any "normal" environment, wanting to run away. Like the film's funneling of information about these characters, the impact of this story is subtle, gradual, and filled with insight. There's a particular confidence in Granik's approach, which trusts us to comprehend who these characters are and how their relationship changes through the details of routines. She also trusts her main actors. Foster's performance is quietly devastating, especially in the moments when Will has flashes of realization about his state of mind (Watch, especially, the scene of him taking the psychological test, as he's directly confronted by thoughts that he has but to which he has never admitted). McKenzie offers the hopeful heart of Leave No Trace, in an equally accomplished performance of conflicting loyalties—to her father and to herself. The film may see the rightness in every character here, but in the end, that simply might be because there's no right answer to this dilemma. Copyright © 2018 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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