ALSO SHOWING
Leave No Trace (PG)
Given it’s been eight years since writer/director Debra Granik picked up an Oscar-nod for Winter’s Bone, setting Jennifer Lawrence on the path to superstardom in the process, it seems appropriate that her own belated return to fiction should feature characters emerging from the wilderness.
In this stripped-down survival drama Ben Foster stars as Will, a war-damaged veteran who’s been living in the woods of a public park in Oregon with his 13-year-old daughter, Tom (Thomasin Mckenzie). Their day-to-day routine is built around avoiding detection and securing only what they need, and in the early stages of the film it all seems very post-apocalyptic. In a sense that’s exactly what it is – it’s just that their apocalypse is an internal one that Will is trying to negotiate by keeping himself and his daughter free from the toxic impact of modern American society and its spirit-killing conformity.
Will and Tom don’t articulate or parrot any particular ideology, though; their reasons for being out there are hinted at in the essential papers Will carries in his dry bag, but we don’t get much in the way of back story, even when Tom accidentally (or perhaps not so accidentally) lets herself be seen by a passing trail runner and the outside world of police dogs and social services comes crashing in on their frontier-style existence.
Instead the story spins off in unexpected and rigorously unsentimental directions as imperfect solutions to their situation are found – solutions that let Tom gradually move centre stage in her own story, utilising the skills and self-reliance drummed into her by her father to become her own person without being subjected to the kind of brutalisation a film like this might be tempted to exploit for dubious dramatic purposes.
Indeed it’s Granik’s absolute confidence in telling such a harsh story with such tenderness and subtlety that makes it stand out. Hopefully it won’t be another eight years until her next film.
Adrift (12A)
This is a factually-based account of a peripatetic American woman who finds herself stranded on the high seas after a storm destroys the yacht that her boyfriend has been hired to sail back to the US. Serving as both producer and star, Shailene Woodley commits to the physically ravaging nature of Tami Ashcraft’s real-life ordeal. Alas, the flash-back structure detailing her nascent romance with handsome Brit sailor Richard Sharp (Sam Claflin), together with a rather hokey dramatic conceit that doesn’t ring true on screen (even though it’s apparently true to the real Ashcraft’s experience), detracts from what could have been a fascinating woman-against-nature drama.
Time Trial (15)
Real lives rarely conform to neat narrative arcs and that’s as true of sports stars as anyone else. It’s certainly the case with cyclist David Millar, whose career is one of glittering highs and shameful lows. Having made a comeback after a doping scandal in 2004, he wanted to finish his career on a high by competing in the Tour de France for a final time. Instead he found that, at 37, he was no longer good enough and was cut from the team.
Time Trial captures this final year in all its gruelling agony. The result is an immersive, sobering, brutal film about what it takes to not only compete at that level, but to endure the humiliation of failure when you can no longer physically do what you once took for granted. ■