Leave No Trace (2018)
Directed by Debra Granik
A father and daughter live a perfect but mysterious existence in Forest Park, a beautiful nature reserve near Portland, Oregon, rarely making contact with the world. But when a small mistake tips them off to authorities, they are sent on an increasingly erratic journey in search of a place to call their own.
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42 films that influenced Leave No Trace
What critics say influenced Leave No Trace
It’s a story that might remind some of such films as Captain Fantastic and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, both curiously starring Viggo Mortensen, or perhaps Kelly Reichardt’s small dramas set in the American Northwest (Wendy and Lucy, Old Joy).
This is sort of like Captain Fantastic —another Bleecker Street release, like Leave No Trace—but not as quirky (I see you, Hot Dad Viggo Mortensen ), and also sort of like this year’s A24 release Lean on Pete , but not as interested in the ramifications of inherited poverty.
Should she be required to? (These are similar to themes addressed in 2016’s Captain Fantastic .)
Compared to similarly themed fare, the movie is more profoundly affecting than the likable but light “Hearts Beat Loud” and more believable than the colorful “Captain Fantastic.”
With echoes of The Ballad Of Jack And Rose and Captain Fantastic , Leave No Trace is a close study of a father who has turned his back on humanity and the child he raises in this unconventional wilderness lifestyle.
…fight against the system, a la the similarly themed 2016 Sundance hit Captain Fantastic —or some kind of horror of exploitation.
Granik's sophomore effort, Winter's Bone (2010), brought critical acclaim to TV actress Jennifer Lawrence for her flinty performance as an impoverished 17-year-old girl fending for herself and her younger siblings in the Ozarks.
Debra Granik is the writer-director who accelerated Jennifer Lawrence's path to the top by casting her in Winter's Bone (2010), a film with an impact far beyond its modest scale and budget.
Granik’s surprise 2010 smash “Winter’s Bone” provided a career-making showcase for a then-unknown actress named Jennifer Lawrence, and “Leave No Trace” offers the same for the remarkable young Thomasin McKenzie, who stars here as thirteen-year-old Tom, coming of age in a campsite off the grid in an Oregon National Park with her PTSD-rattled dad, Will.
Loosely adapted from the novel My Abandonment by Peter Rock, Leave No Trace was directed by Debra Granik, whose last fiction feature was Winter’s Bone (2010).
Like she did with her Oscar-nominated “Winter’s Bone,” Granik views this metamorphosis as an unbiased observer, letting the story she again wrote with Anne Rossellini unfold slowly and organically without a hint of sentimentality.
It’s a story that might remind some of such films as Captain Fantastic and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, both curiously starring Viggo Mortensen, or perhaps Kelly Reichardt’s small dramas set in the American Northwest (Wendy and Lucy, Old Joy).
In films like Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy, Reichardt presents the region as a place where life is tough and the people persist in a quiet, gentle way.
Leave No Trace feels like it belongs to a school of Northwest neorealism I most closely associate with Kelly Reichardt, the Portland-based director whose film Wendy and Lucy was about the tragic mercy that strangers extend to one another when they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Though Granik’s approach is reminiscent of the sensitive, stripped-down style of Kelly Reichardt’s work (“Wendy and Lucy,” “Certain Women”), by reteaming with Scottish cinematographer Michael McDonough (who shot not only “Winter’s Bone,” but also Terence Davies’ radiant “Sunset Song” and the gritty prison drama “Starred Up”), she creates a richer visual environment in which to dwell.
It’s a story that might remind some of such films as Captain Fantastic and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, both curiously starring Viggo Mortensen, or perhaps Kelly Reichardt’s small dramas set in the American Northwest (Wendy and Lucy, Old Joy).
I was reminded often of Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic parenting thriller The Road ; I was also sometimes reminded of Manchester by the Sea , with its narrative of a man unable to shake his demons.
This could be some postapocalyptic scenario — like the father-child pair seen in that other Viggo Mortensen movie, “The Road” — except that neither nuclear war nor zombie outbreak has forced them into such straits.
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It’s a story that might remind some of such films as Captain Fantastic and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, both curiously starring Viggo Mortensen, or perhaps Kelly Reichardt’s small dramas set in the American Northwest (Wendy and Lucy, Old Joy).
In films like Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy, Reichardt presents the region as a place where life is tough and the people persist in a quiet, gentle way.
For all of his bold (and, in my opinion, justified) critiques of contemporary capitalism — which remind me of Allie Fox, the half-mad prophet of Peter Weir’s The Mosquito Coast — Will exposes, at times, a sense of helplessness and grief, a knowledge that he has lost the way back to balance and wisdom.
But this isn’t “The Mosquito Coast” or even “Captain Fantastic,” the off-the-grid approach that Will has adopted isn’t guided by a political philosophy, or, frankly, any philosophy that is identifiable.
Though Granik’s approach is reminiscent of the sensitive, stripped-down style of Kelly Reichardt’s work (“Wendy and Lucy,” “Certain Women”), by reteaming with Scottish cinematographer Michael McDonough (who shot not only “Winter’s Bone,” but also Terence Davies’ radiant “Sunset Song” and the gritty prison drama “Starred Up”), she creates a richer visual environment in which to dwell.
What prevents it from becoming a chore, besides the engulfing, unshowy vistas lensed by cinematographer Michael McDonough (“Sunset Song”), is an unspoken tension between the characters.
Shot by Michael McDonough (“Sunset Song”), these opening scenes establish the film as one that beautifully straddles the line between the realistic and the lyrical.
The filmmaker gazes at her quiet, stoic characters the way, say, Carroll Ballard looked at a shipwrecked boy and horse in “The Black Stallion.”
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The title character of “Jeremiah Johnson” (1972) took similar measures, fleeing into solitude after the Mexican War, but you felt his wary charm and never forgot, for a second, that under the buffer of beard was Robert Redford.
And then there’s Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie, who gives the kind of breathtakingly confident debut that reminds one of Lawrence in Granik’s breakout or Kate Winslet in “ Heavenly Creatures .”