Discovering life in hushed tones at the margins
Leave No Trace inspires respect for those living quietly and unconventionally, Peter Howel writes.
Late into Debra Granik’s Leave
No Trace, a survivalist drama as deep as the forests that engulf it, a beekeeper shows a curious girl how bees won’t sting her if she respects their space.
“It means a lot to me that I have their trust,” the beekeeper says, as she calmly approaches the hive. “I worked hard to get it.”
Granik’s film is like that. It speaks in hushed voices, makes few fast moves and requires the viewer to infer a lot about its characters — and also to fear for their safety.
Yet it leaves viewers with a profound feeling of empathy for the marginalized Americans that have long been a focus of writer/director Granik’s work, including Winter’s Bone, the Oscar-nominated Sundance hit from 2010 that made Jennifer Lawrence a star. Leave No Trace could do the same for Thomasin McKenzie, 18 this month, a discovery from New Zealand.
She looks a little older than the 13-year-old character she plays, a woodlands dweller named Tom, but that’s no impediment to a performance that is among the year’s best.
She is the picture of grace under pressure.
Tom is the girl with the beekeeper, mentioned earlier. When we first meet her, she’s deep in the wilds of Forest Park, a large nature reserve outside Portland, Ore. Tom and her army veteran father, Will (Ben Foster), have lived there for years: undetected, off the grid and almost entirely by their wits.
They make occasional forays into Portland for Will to pick up medications he receives for free from a veteran’s hospital — he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, likely from Iraq War duty. He then trades the drugs to other vets for cash to purchase the few life essentials he and Tom can’t forage.
Appraising this unusual situation through Tom’s eyes (and the calming cinematography of Michael McDonough), it appears unthreatening and even idyllic. Tom adores her father, apparently a widower, who cares for Tom the best he can, teaching her from an old encyclopedia and drilling her in survival techniques he learned in the army.
They’re happy together, until the day they’re spotted and reported to the authorities, who react the way authorities do: Will and Tom are told they’re illegally camping on public lands. They must be removed and rehabilitated. Will needs a job, Tom needs to go to school and they both need a proper home.
All of which is provided to them, but unlike most such movies, the agents of straight society aren’t cruel caricatures. A social worker named Jean (Dana Millican) tries her best to find Will and Tom a place where they can be together in a rural environment.
But it’s not enough for the damaged vet, whom Foster invests with uncommon reserve, a change from the brutes he usually plays in movies such as Hostiles and 3:10 to Yuma.
Will and Tom seem to have everything they need, but they already had that — and Will feels that the two of them really need to return to the forest, no matter the danger and despite what she may think.
Granik co-wrote Leave No Trace with her Winter’s Bone screenwriter Anne Rosellini. They adapted their screenplay from author Peter Rock’s novel My Abandonment, which was based on the true story of a father and daughter who in 1999 were discovered living in a Forest Park cave.
The movie is as much docudrama as fiction. It inspires appreciation and respect for people who quietly live unconventional lives, taking only what the Earth wants to give them.
It invites us into their world, and works hard to earn our trust.