Starring Ben Foster

A haunted veteran and his barely teen daughter live a clandestine existence deep inside Portland’s vast Forest Park, foraging for greens and mushrooms, huddling to keep dry beneath a tattered tarp, and running drills in the event that somebody might notice them. So begins this affecting and sensitive drama, in which the probably PTSD–suffering Will (Hell or High Water’s Ben Foster), framed inside Pacific Northwest rainforest that might as well be Southeast Asian jungle canopy, comes to symbolize multiple generations of American “fighting” men alienated from the war state they served.

Director Debra Granik isn’t prone to such blunt messaging, mind you, adapting Peter Rock’s book My Abandonment with an almost Zenlike grace in cahoots with frequent writing and producing partner Anne Rosellini. This portrait of America’s invisible underclass is as reserved and practical as the off-the-grid impulse it depicts, with a mossy feel for location that invites comparison to the films of Kelly Reichardt. Yet, beneath the slight narrative, deliberate pace, and long stretches of quiet, Granik and her outstanding cast are busy flushing Leave No Trace with sadness and compassion.

The film avoids explaining what makes Will tick, or why he’s chosen, as a single parent, to disappear into the margins. Home-schooled (forest-schooled?) daughter Tom (flawless Thomasin McKenzie) tests above average when the duo is busted for vagrancy and ends up in the case files of social services. Tom’s deeper smarts are developed, we suppose, from years of providing a damaged but loving father with an equivalent amount of caregiving. (And helping him with those night terrors.)

It’s that forced induction into slightly more conventional society that naturally gives the film its thrust, as its characters journey from a Samaritan-run tree farm to, ultimately, another deep-woods community with a collective allergy to modern life, seductively depicted complete with acoustic campfire asides from folk veterans Michael Hurley and Marisa Anderson. Along the way, Tom finds herself drawn to iPhones and a rabbit-rearing farm boy (Isaiah Stone, who debuted in Granik’s Winter’s Bone). But Will’s withdrawal is a one-way deal, and the film gambles (and wins) on an eloquent final image that transports Leave No Trace into the realm of modern fable.

Published July, 2018