Or Maybe Leave a Small One

Leave No Trace a film by Debra Granik.  With Ben Foster, Thomasin McKenzie. *****

Leave No Trace is a marvelous and heartbreaking film, certainly the best movie of the summer if not of the year so far.  I’d seen the trailer five or six times and had the vague feeling this was one of those We’re-Better-Than-the-Rest-of-You movies, We-Live-Close-to-the-Land-While-You-Have-Your-Plastic-Lives, like 2016’s Captain Fantastic, but it isn’t that at all.  It’s a study of a remarkable thirteen-year-old girl and her troubled father, the way they get by and sometimes don’t, and though there’s a host of fascinating minor characters, this movie is a vehicle for its two stars.  If they weren’t just right, it would fall flat on its face.  But they’re both great.

What I most admire is the movie’s restraint.  The IMDb website says that when Ben Foster signed on to the movie with director Debra Granik, they cut 40% of the dialogue, and those cuts were golden.  The film gains power by all we don’t know.  It’s based on a Peter Rock novel, My Abandonment, and it’s an awful thing to say, but the movie made me not want to read the novel.  I’ve seen a superb work of art and don’t want to know any more.  I know enough.

Will (Foster) is a troubled Vet living with his daughter Tom (Thomasin McKenzie) on public land in Oregon.  We sense his trouble by only a few scenes, one early on when he awakens from a bad dream, another after he’s been captured and is facing questions about his psychological state.  Otherwise he seems a model father.  He’s taught his daughter how to live off the land, apparently also taught her how to read and do other school subjects; when they’re finally brought in, the woman who tests her says she’s ahead of where she needs to be.  They’ve never had a telephone, much less a cell phone or a computer.  They sit in a tent at night reading old hardbacks that look as if they came from the library.

They’re obviously, in some way, on the lam.  They have a drill where they each run off and hide, concealing their tracks, and Tom obviously knows it’s a problem when she’s sitting out reading one day and somebody seems to spot her (she quickly hides and stays out of sight).  Apparently the only thing they’re doing wrong is living on public land (as a counselor later explains, it’s not a crime to be unhoused; it’s a crime to live on public land).  In that way they’re criminals.  But it’s hard not to see them as living a better life than many other people, and to see him as a father who, against all the odds, has done a wonderful job of raising his daughter.

There are many questions the movie doesn’t answer.  Where is Tom’s mother (we assume she’s dead) and how long has she been gone (Tom reveals in one scene that she has no memory of her)?  How in these circumstances did Will raise a girl who must have been very young when they began, and who turned out so well?  Where do they get whatever money they need to live (we do, on one occasion, see them go into town and visit a center for veterans; Tom, heartbreakingly, seeks advice about how to deal with a suicidal vet, while Will picks up some pills, which he later sells to other vets who are living off the land.  That’s the only money-making venture we see)?  But we ignore these questions in the face of this compelling situation: this man and his daughter are out there living on the land.  Then, not too far into the movie, in a way that isn’t terribly brutal, they’re caught.

The tragedy of their situation, which we realize gradually, is that they have each other, in a wonderful way, but have no one else.  Will doesn’t need anyone, in fact can’t have anyone.  But Tom, as she begins to discover, and as she finally says to him, toward the end of the movie, is not like him.  She isn’t aware of all she’s supposedly missing, like cell phones and computers and Twitter and Instagram, but is aware, or gradually becomes aware, that she’s missing human contact and would like to have it.  She can’t live with her father and lead a normal life.

The scenes where she discovers normality are stunning because they’re so ordinary.  In one community, she happens upon a pet rabbit that’s gotten loose, then the guy who’s raising it, who’s about her age and in 4-H.  In the scenes of 4-H kids learning to show their rabbits; of a church that is so weird that it’s howlingly funny (I wondered about laughing at a church down here in the Bible belt, but everyone else was laughing) but is nevertheless touching in the way it welcomes them; and later in the film, at a trailer camp where people lead simple lives and leave each other alone, understand PTSD without necessarily knowing the term, it’s amazing to see how people both help Will and Tom and give them space.  It sounds corny to say, but in a way this movie is about the essential goodness of people, a wide variety of people, not just those who voted for your favorite political candidate.

As in the earlier Winter’s Bone, a much different kind of movie but similarly off the grid, Debra Granik uses people who don’t seem to be actors in a number of scenes.  She understands the beauty of ordinary lives without trying to beautify them.  I was as touched by scenes of a woman showing Tom her bees, and Tom showing the bees to Will, and an old guy singing a duet with a younger woman, as by any other scenes in the movie.  This is a simple story, terribly sad.  The restraint with which it’s told makes it all the sadder, and more real.