Walk on the wild side with a runaway dad and daughter
Leave No Trace (PG) Verdict: Off-grid parenting
DIRECTOR Debra Granik launched the career of Jennifer Lawrence when she spotted the young actress and cast her in her gritty mountain drama Winter’s Bone.
Now Granik has done it again with talented Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie, who plays another girl coming of age in the American wilderness.
In Leave No Trace, McKenzie is Tom, an only child who has lived off-grid for years with her father Will (a superbly understated Ben Foster). We first see them living the bucolic high life in the emerald-dappled light of a forest near Portland, Oregon.
The father-daughter relationship is beautifully explored, with an almost silent harmony as they display expert survival skills, and hide like feral animals from work crews and trekkers. Leave no trace is their mantra.
But as Tom grows from a child
into a young woman, her curiosity about the outside world increases, while her father, a war veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress, needs the safety of isolation.
After a clandestine visit to town for supplies, the pull between nature and civilisation destroys their idyll, and social services intervene. Forms will be filled out.
Will is suffocated by convention and enclosure in a traditional house, and when helicopters come in to pick up batches of Christmas trees he is chopping in his new job, the battle in his head explodes.
Thus begins a dangerous adventure in the wild, as father and daughter go on the run and temperatures head below zero.
There’s a real warmth and generosity to the strangers who help Will and Tom along their way. The eccentric folk living in trailers in the woods here could fairly be described as the salt of the earth, although their guitar playing could do with some polishing.
McKenzie is utterly convincing with her tender, budding performance, and her pale face illuminates the screen.
The delicate balance between a man unable to face normal life, and a teenager who wants to embrace it, tips the scales.
Granik has made another brave, evocative, lyrical film, which shows the underbelly of rural America in a new light.