Post by Dracula on Jul 12, 2018 20:13:28 GMT -5
Leave No Trace(7/7/2018)
Usually for me a decision to go to the movies is something planned weeks in advance. I keep an eye on release schedules for the big movies, I monitor festival buzz for the small movies, and I generally know what’s coming and when. Every once in a while though I can be surprised a little by something, which is what happened with the film Leave No Trace. I never saw a trailer for the movie and while I can see now that it did play at Sundance I don’t remember hearing a whole lot about it at the time, possibly because the title and basic concept don’t stand out a whole lot. So the film was completely off my radar when I suddenly saw that it would be playing at my local limited release theater and when I googled it two things stood out to me: 1. It was directed by Debra Granick, who had a big breakout with 2010’s Winter’s Bone before sort of disappearing afterwards, and 2. that the movie had a 100% rating on Rottentomatoes. Now I know a lot of people don’t think terribly highly of Rottentomatoes and a movie certainly shouldn’t be judged in its totality by having a good or bad score on it, but anyway you cut it managing to get 120 film critics to agree on something has to mean something.
The film is by and large the story of a father and a daughter. The father is a man named Will (Ben Foster) a veteran who suffers in some way from PTSD and whose wife appears to have died at some unclear time in the past for reasons that are never explained. As the film starts Will does not own a conventional home and has opted to live at an illegal campsite in a national park in New York with his teenage daughter Tom (presumably short for “Thomasin” a name she share with the actress who plays her, Thomasin McKenzie). The two have managed to survive a long time more or less off the grid and Will seems to have pretty effectively home schooled Tom along the way. However this way of life comes under threat when someone spots Tom and the next day police arrive with dogs to locate the two of them. The next thing you know Will and Tom are forced to justify themselves to Child Protective Services and fight to stay together.
“Family that shuns a conventional lifestyle and lives in the woods” has become something of a sub-genre as of late. I’m sure there are even earlier precursors but I first remember a story like this coming to cinema screens with the 2007 documentary Surfwise, about a family that raised their kids in an RV that toured various beaches. I believe there was another film along these lines called The Glass Castle but the film that probably told a story like this with the most commercial success lately was a film called Captain Fantastic with Viggo Mortenson as a widower father who has to defend his rights to raise his kids in the woods and homeschool them rather than enroll them in school or give them normal shelter. In terms of high concept the similarities between Leave No Trace and Captain Fantastic are pretty clear but the movies actually have pretty different tones. I think Captain Fantastic was technically an independent movie but it didn’t really feel like one. It occasionally examined the negative effects of raising kids like this but it also wants people to see the family as kind of cute and let its audience decide the morality of it all.
Leave No Trace is perhaps a more realistic look at what a life like this would look like and almost has the opposite problem of not really explaining why anyone would find this kind of life so appealing. Captain Fantastic was pretty upfront about that family’s motivations: the parents were hippies who had political qualms with modern life and was more than happy to expound on this at length. Here the father’s motivations are left a bit more unspoken. I wouldn’t call Will entirely apolitical but he certainly doesn’t seem like someone who’s inclined to have the family celebrate Noam Chomsky’s birthday. Instead the implication here seems to be that Will’s inability to live in a house with running water seems to be a function of his PTSD. One imagines a backstory where he came back from the war, stares at a cereal aisle like Jeremy Renner’s character from The Hurt Locker, but unlike him can’t re-enlist because he’s got a daughter who would be more or less orphaned if he did. Tom by contrast mostly seems to be completely on board with this life but it’s not clear at first if that’s because she truly loves the outdoors or if it’s because she loves her father and doesn’t know what she’s missing from society.
As I mentioned before this is Debra Granick’s first film in eight years since directing the Oscar nominated Winter’s Bone, a film that perhaps unfairly became better known for introducing audiences to Jennifer Lawrence than it did for its direction. Personally, I liked Winter’s Bone but I did think some of the hype around it was a bit overblown. It certainly had an interesting setting but it often felt like it didn’t have much going for it beyond its anthropological observations about Middle America. This new film has its Hell or High Water moments where it stops to make comments about rural America in decline but it doesn’t feel like the movie is merely a pretext to witness these communities and really does keep the focus on the characters for the most part. That’s probably the right choice but I still don’t necessarily think this is a story for the ages or characters that will live on with me too long after I’m done watching the film even though they’re very well written and acted. It lacks the veneer of genre that probably helped Winter’s Bone gain a wider audience so I don’t know that this is going to be as much of a breakout even though I largely consider it a better movie.
***1/2 out of Five
Usually for me a decision to go to the movies is something planned weeks in advance. I keep an eye on release schedules for the big movies, I monitor festival buzz for the small movies, and I generally know what’s coming and when. Every once in a while though I can be surprised a little by something, which is what happened with the film Leave No Trace. I never saw a trailer for the movie and while I can see now that it did play at Sundance I don’t remember hearing a whole lot about it at the time, possibly because the title and basic concept don’t stand out a whole lot. So the film was completely off my radar when I suddenly saw that it would be playing at my local limited release theater and when I googled it two things stood out to me: 1. It was directed by Debra Granick, who had a big breakout with 2010’s Winter’s Bone before sort of disappearing afterwards, and 2. that the movie had a 100% rating on Rottentomatoes. Now I know a lot of people don’t think terribly highly of Rottentomatoes and a movie certainly shouldn’t be judged in its totality by having a good or bad score on it, but anyway you cut it managing to get 120 film critics to agree on something has to mean something.
The film is by and large the story of a father and a daughter. The father is a man named Will (Ben Foster) a veteran who suffers in some way from PTSD and whose wife appears to have died at some unclear time in the past for reasons that are never explained. As the film starts Will does not own a conventional home and has opted to live at an illegal campsite in a national park in New York with his teenage daughter Tom (presumably short for “Thomasin” a name she share with the actress who plays her, Thomasin McKenzie). The two have managed to survive a long time more or less off the grid and Will seems to have pretty effectively home schooled Tom along the way. However this way of life comes under threat when someone spots Tom and the next day police arrive with dogs to locate the two of them. The next thing you know Will and Tom are forced to justify themselves to Child Protective Services and fight to stay together.
“Family that shuns a conventional lifestyle and lives in the woods” has become something of a sub-genre as of late. I’m sure there are even earlier precursors but I first remember a story like this coming to cinema screens with the 2007 documentary Surfwise, about a family that raised their kids in an RV that toured various beaches. I believe there was another film along these lines called The Glass Castle but the film that probably told a story like this with the most commercial success lately was a film called Captain Fantastic with Viggo Mortenson as a widower father who has to defend his rights to raise his kids in the woods and homeschool them rather than enroll them in school or give them normal shelter. In terms of high concept the similarities between Leave No Trace and Captain Fantastic are pretty clear but the movies actually have pretty different tones. I think Captain Fantastic was technically an independent movie but it didn’t really feel like one. It occasionally examined the negative effects of raising kids like this but it also wants people to see the family as kind of cute and let its audience decide the morality of it all.
Leave No Trace is perhaps a more realistic look at what a life like this would look like and almost has the opposite problem of not really explaining why anyone would find this kind of life so appealing. Captain Fantastic was pretty upfront about that family’s motivations: the parents were hippies who had political qualms with modern life and was more than happy to expound on this at length. Here the father’s motivations are left a bit more unspoken. I wouldn’t call Will entirely apolitical but he certainly doesn’t seem like someone who’s inclined to have the family celebrate Noam Chomsky’s birthday. Instead the implication here seems to be that Will’s inability to live in a house with running water seems to be a function of his PTSD. One imagines a backstory where he came back from the war, stares at a cereal aisle like Jeremy Renner’s character from The Hurt Locker, but unlike him can’t re-enlist because he’s got a daughter who would be more or less orphaned if he did. Tom by contrast mostly seems to be completely on board with this life but it’s not clear at first if that’s because she truly loves the outdoors or if it’s because she loves her father and doesn’t know what she’s missing from society.
As I mentioned before this is Debra Granick’s first film in eight years since directing the Oscar nominated Winter’s Bone, a film that perhaps unfairly became better known for introducing audiences to Jennifer Lawrence than it did for its direction. Personally, I liked Winter’s Bone but I did think some of the hype around it was a bit overblown. It certainly had an interesting setting but it often felt like it didn’t have much going for it beyond its anthropological observations about Middle America. This new film has its Hell or High Water moments where it stops to make comments about rural America in decline but it doesn’t feel like the movie is merely a pretext to witness these communities and really does keep the focus on the characters for the most part. That’s probably the right choice but I still don’t necessarily think this is a story for the ages or characters that will live on with me too long after I’m done watching the film even though they’re very well written and acted. It lacks the veneer of genre that probably helped Winter’s Bone gain a wider audience so I don’t know that this is going to be as much of a breakout even though I largely consider it a better movie.
***1/2 out of Five
