You can feel how much the presence of four walls and a ceiling torments him, how he won't be able to bear it for long.ĭebra Granik treats the story with a feather-light touch, while still grounding the film in an almost documentary-style reality. Will experiences society as confining as Procrustes' bed. Meanwhile, Tom befriends a local farm kid, who invites her to his 4-H meetings, where kids show up with their rabbits. Ben works, staring at the bound-up Christmas trees flying through the air into a truck, and you don't need dialogue to feel his sense of isolation, his longing to be back in the woods again. Will and Tom are reunited, thanks to a kindly stranger who steps forward after reading about them in the newspaper, offering Ben a job and a home on his Christmas tree farm. "Leave No Trace" is filled with quiet moments like this, and yet it avoids being self-consciously "heartwarming." People are cruel sometimes, yes, but sometimes they are kind too. And Will, totally out of place at a computer, struggling to answer the 100s of questions put to him, is helped by a social worker who walks him through it. But when Tom wanders into the main room of the juvenile center, two teenage girls tell her they're working on their "dream boards" and does she want to do one too? They offer her construction paper. The expectation may be that bureaucracy would be presented as heartless and cold, and of course in some ways it is. Granik's presentation, though, is idiosyncratic. The forest gives way, jarringly, to the fluorescent lights of well-meaning but incompetent human bureaucracy. Tom is put into a detention center for teenage girls, and Will is given a battery of psychological tests. Their world is a fragile Eden, though, and when a jogger spots Tom one day, cops come and raid their makeshift camp, bringing Will and Tom for questioning. Granik roots her tale in reality, focusing on the details of their lives.
The intimacy between them is so palpable it comes with great anxiety about what might be waiting for them outside the forest. These two actors are so in sync, so mentally connected, you believe totally they are father and daughter, you believe they've been living in the woods for months, maybe even years. The life is hard, but the love between father and daughter is undeniable. Will makes money selling prescription drugs to people living in a tent city on the outskirts of the park. They sleep in sleeping bags, cuddling up for warmth as the rain pours down on their tent. The opening sequence unfolds with almost no dialogue, giving us an intimate sense of the their routines, their wordless communication and accord. Will ( Ben Foster) and his 13-year-old daughter Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie) are first seen chopping wood, playing chess, gathering mushrooms, surrounded by tarps and propane tanks. The film starts in a forest of proliferating wet trees and moss, a thick impenetrable wall of green, which turns out to be a public park in Portland, Oregon.
At its very best, it is an immensely moving portrait of a father and daughter who love each other, and who can't bear to be apart. Granik shows great insight into the struggles of those who choose to "opt out," those who just want to be left alone, those who literally can't "fit in" to the larger world. "Leave No Trace" is, at times, heartbreaking, but it's also filled with glimpses of almost casual human kindness, throwaway moments of good will and inclusion piercing through what could be the bleakest of tales. Her new film, "Leave No Trace," adapted from the 2009 novel, My Abandonment by Peter Rock, combines elements of "Winter's Bone" and "Stray Dog," the young girl off the grid, the troubled veteran living with PTSD. Granik's work contains a real social and political critique, even more so since she focuses in on individuals. Granik's follow-up was the documentary " Stray Dog," showing the psychological struggles of Vietnam vet and activist Ron Hall. Debra Granik's 2010 " Winter's Bone" was a bleak, powerful film, introducing Jennifer Lawrence to a wide audience in her self-assured performance as a 17-year-old girl trying to keep her family together in the economically devastated Ozarks.
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