Thomasin makes a mark in Trace
Leave No Trace (PG, 108mins) Directed by Debra Granik Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★★1⁄2
Back in 2008, I was asked to work on a film shoot up in the windswept hills above Makara, on Wellington’s wild south-west coast.
The film – Existence – featured a couple of truly astonishing child actors, brother and sister Peter and Thomasin Harcourt-McKenzie.
Ten years down the track, Peter looks on target to one day become the Secretary-General of the United Nations at the very least. Meanwhile, Thomasin has just turned up in a film that will almost certainly – if that is what she wants – be the launching pad to a global career.
Leave No Trace is writerdirector Debra Granik’s longawaited follow up to the superb Winter’s Bone, similarly set a long way off the usual tracks, among the lost and forgotten of present-day America.
Will (Hell or High Water’s Ben Foster) is a veteran of a recent war. Unable to fit back into society, he has taken to the heavily forested parkland outside Portland, Oregon. With Will is his 13-year-old daughter Tom (HarcourtMcKenzie).
The pair co-exist perfectly well in isolation. Their camp is organised and secure, and the city is only a day’s walk distant when supplies are needed.
But we know their situation cannot last. Being homeless is not a crime in Oregon, but living on what is called public land is. When the authorities arrive, Will and Tom will have to learn how to live among people again, or refuse and retreat back to the woods.
Leave No Trace addresses both possibilities in an uncommonly insightful screenplay.
Granik and co-writer Anne Rosellini (who also co-wrote Winter’s Bone) have adapted Peter Rock’s novel My Abandonment into a low-key, quietly observational story about a man mistaking his fear for strength, and the slow realisation that the life he has chosen is not one his daughter should have to share.
Foster is superb here, a wary and watchful man, prepared to sell his pain medication to other homeless veterans to make the money he and Tom still need.
But he’s also a warm and misguidedly heroic man determined to protect his daughter from a world he has decided has no place for them.
But the film ultimately belongs to Harcourt-McKenzie and a performance she constructs via a series of indelible, perfectly calibrated moments.
It is her arc we follow, as she begins to see her Dad through a clearer lens and is compelled to make a series of heart-rending decisions.
Among a small support cast, the great Dale Dickey (Hell or High Water) is a treat. Cinematographer Michael McDonough – who also shot Winter’s Bone for Granik – works wonders in the misted green vastness of the forests, before finding a completely different palette and frame for the actors once they are forced in to ‘‘civilisation’’.
Leave No Trace is an absolute gem, a quietly enthralling film that never overplays its hand, resorts to histrionics and contrived stand-offs or forgets to recognise the dignity of its characters.