Butler's Cinema Scene

Thomasin Mckenzie, Ben Foster

“LEAVE NO TRACE” My rating: A- 

109 minutes | MPAA rating: PG

Literature tells us.

Cinema shows us.

And few films are better at showing us than “Leave No Trace,” Debra Granik’s second feature (after 2010’s flabbergastingly good “Winter’s Bone”).

There’s little dialogue in this film, and most of that is of a matter-of-fact nature. Situations that other movies would take pains to explain here  go unaddressed.

But far from diminishing the experience, this oral reticence makes  “Leave No Trace”  a rewardingly rich viewing experience.  Nobody tells us what’s going on; we simply watch…and then we know.

As the film begins 15-year-old Tom (Thomasin McKenzie) and her father Will (Ben Foster) appear to be on a camping trip. They’re foraging for food, cooking over a campfire, sleeping under a tarp.

But at certain points Will announces that they’re having a drill. Dropping everything, Tom races into the thick forest undergrowth.  If her father can find her, she’s flunked.

Clearly,  this is no suburban father and daughter on a weekend retreat. The two are living in the woods, evading hikers and a groundskeeping crew of prison convicts. Periodically they go into town — they’re squatting in a park just outside Portland — where Will picks up his cocktail of psychotropic drugs from the V.A. and resells them to other veterans in a hobo town.

How did father and daughter end up hiding out in the woods?  What happened to Tom’s mother? What is the nature of Will’s mental illness? (A big clue is the way he involuntarily flinches whenever he hears a helicopter.) And is he dangerous?

The screenplay by Granik and regular collaborator Anne Rossellini (based on Peter Rock’s novel My Abandonment) lets those questions hang. But no worries…everything we need to know about these fugitives is there if we pay attention.

Thomasin McKenzie

“Leave No Trace” kicks into gear when the pair are picked up in a raid by park rangers. Tom is referred to child services, where a case worker (Dana Millikan) discovers that thanks to her father’s tutoring the girl is educationally well ahead of the curve — if utterly ignorant of the cultural trivia which passes for verbal currency among her contemporaries.

Will, meantime, is subjected to a battery of psychological tests that seem simultaneously invasive and ridiculous.

At least the social workers seem like good people with the pair’s best interests at heart.  After several days apart Will and Tom are reunited on a farm where they occupy a small house (Will’s first move is to unplug the TV and put it in a closet). He will work growing and cutting Christmas trees.  She will try to become a normal teen.

The real conflict of “Leave No Trace” involves how each of them adapts — or fails to — to this new way of life.

Tom finds herself modestly intoxicated by this brave new world of the everyday.  A neighbor boy takes her to his 4-H meeting and lets her handle his domesticated rabbit. Father and daughter attend church, mostly to please the kindly farmer (Jeff Kober) who has taken them in. Tom looks forward to starting school.

But the girl’s growing flirtation with normalcy and her dad’s utter inability to live in a structure not of his own creating spells trouble. Before long the two are once again on the run, only this time the new knots in their relationship threaten to unravel all.

In “Winter’s Bone” Granik introduced the greater world to the wonder that is Jennifer Lawrence,  who snagged a Best Actress nomination. Something similar may be at play with young McKenzie, who suggests her character’s rich inner life without ever doing anything as obvious as acting. This young woman can break your heart.

For that matter, so does Foster.  He has, of course, a resume thick with eye-rolling crazies.  But as shown by “Hell or High Water,” he possesses untapped depths. Under Granik’s direction, Foster mines and refines them.  Will may be the subtlest yet most gut-wrenching depiction of mental illness in recent memory. Foster never hams it up; It’s all very quiet and contained. But you can see both the character’s deep love for his child and the ticking psyche that will tear him loose from all he holds dear.

The cinematography of Michael McDonough (another “Winter’s Bone” alumn) somehow manages to be beautiful without drawing attention to itself. The fern and pine forests of the Pacific Northwest have rarely been shot with such knowing attention.

Granik isn’t a particularly showy director.  No look-at-me-ma flourishes. Everything works organically, quietly, efficiently…and disarmingly beautifully. Like a few others — Jean Renoir, say, or Yasujiro Ozu — she is a humanist filmmaker of the first order.

Please…don’t make us wait another eight years for her next feature.

| Robert W. Butler