Debra Granik (2018)

Debra Granik takes her time between projects.  Leave No Trace is only the second dramatic feature she’s made since her debut with Down to the Bone in 2004, and her first since 2010.   A documentary, Stray Dog, appeared in 2014, halfway through the eight-year interval between Winter’s Bone and this new film.  Leave No Trace has some similarities to its widely admired predecessor.   Granik wrote the screenplay with Anne Rosellini and adapted it from a recent novel (in this case, My Abandonment by Peter Rock, first published in 2009).  A teenage girl is again the central character, although thirteen-year-old Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie) is several years younger than Jennifer Lawrence’s Ree Dolly.  Both heroines, thanks largely to the actions of their fathers, live an existence far removed from conventional comfort and security.  Yet differences between the two films are more striking.

Leave No Trace is a two- rather than one-character study:  the paterfamilias absent throughout Winter’s Bone is very present here, in the shape of Tom’s father Will (Ben Foster).  Where Ree’s family circumstances, including her father’s criminality, were typical of the economically deprived community Granik described, Tom’s situation is dictated by the unusually and determinedly anti-social behaviour of a father who, within the limits of their curious lifestyle, loves and cares for his daughter.  Will, a widower, has taken responsibility for Tom’s schooling in essential academic subjects as well as in the practical skills their modus vivendi requires.  Father and daughter live in isolation in what is technically parkland in Portland, Oregon but which, to any urban viewer, looks like wilderness.  Will and Tom’s habitat is very different from the drained-of-colour Ozarks world of Winter’s Bone:  the natural light and verdure of the opening scenes, as captured by the cinematographer Martin McDonough, are close to paradisal.

Debra Granik describes the forest-dwellers’ routines of foraging for and cooking food though they’re not without funds:  they walk into Portland to shop at a supermarket and back out again.  They’ll pitch camp in the tent they share at night (without the least suggestion that the arrangement is anything but innocent).  After a while, they’ll move on to another part of the area (leaving no trace in the spot they left behind).  There’s next to no backstory.   We know that Will has seen military action – he goes to a veterans’ hospital in Portland to collect medication (which he sells on, to another vet living rough) – but not where or when he fought.  We don’t know how long he and Tom have been living in the woods, though there’s no indication that she remembers anything different.  She expresses regret that she can’t remember her other parent and asks her father what her mother’s favourite colour was.  Will tells her then asks which colour is Tom’s favourite.  (The answer to both questions is yellow.)  The actors suggest this conversation is one that their characters have had before and enjoy repeating occasionally.

Their way of life seems settled but it can’t, of course, last.  Rangers discover Will and Tom, remind them it’s illegal to live on public land and temporarily separate them, before social services house them together in a rural community, where Tom goes to school and Will is given a job felling Christmas trees.  This can’t last either – Will needs to return to isolation and Tom follows – but the episode proves pivotal in having showing her the possibility and appeal of a different kind of existence.  Their return to the woods, in adverse weather, is gruelling for Tom.  Shortly afterwards, Will is injured in a fall.  Thanks to his daughter’s presence of mind, they’re taken in by denizens (including other veterans) of a trailer park.  Once Will has recovered from his injury, he wants to move on again but this time Tom digs her heels in.   ‘What’s wrong with you isn’t wrong with me’, she tells her father.  He admits that he knows it.  Though he doesn’t say as much, he knows too that he’s depriving his daughter for selfish reasons.  Leave No Trace ends with their separation, as Will goes back literally under cover.  The wilderness is still beautiful to look at but that’s ot why he has to be there.

This new film is less dramatically eventful than Winter’s Bone and Tom’s journey is lower-key than Ree’s but Debra Granik strikes a good balance of keeping the story going with a reasonable amount of incident while ensuring the dialogue and acting don’t break out of the realistic frame she creates.  After a disappointing performance in The Program (2015) and an inevitably limited one in Hell or High Water (2016), Ben Foster is very good here:  his closed-off intensity is right for Will.  Foster hints definitely but economically at the source of this man’s need to be (nearly) alone.  His urgent, startled reaction to the noise of a helicopter overhead probably reflects his memories of warfare though it could just signal Will’s wary alertness to the approach of any forces he instinctively sees as threatening to his solitariness.  Even if battle trauma (rather than widowerhood) is the root problem, Will has been changed by war in a way Leave No Trace’s less unsociable vets have not.  Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie, sixteen when the film was shot, is no less emotionally alert, in a very different register.  She’s especially good at realising Tom’s experience of things for the first time – with a lovely, hopeful curiosity.  She touchingly expresses how the girl starts to see familiar things in a different light.

The sounds of machinery that interferes with nature, whether it belongs to the park rangers or the Christmas tree farmer (Jeff Kober) who employs Will, are ominous but Granik is more interested in her characters than in conveying obvious environmental messages.  She similarly avoids turning people into goodies and baddies.  The representatives of social services are decent and sensitive, as is a church pastor.   Dale Dickey, remarkably different from the frightening figure she was in Winter’s Bone, is excellent as a shrewdly humane, motherly woman in the trailer park community.   Beautifully lit as it is, I could have done without the repeated image of a spider’s web that turns out to be symbolic.  I have to admit I still wish this director could lighten up a little more.  But Leave No Trace is more nuanced than Winter’s Bone and Debra Granik’s third feature an impressive piece of work.

29 June 2018