OCS PULP – TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 12 AT 9:00 P.M. – FILM
On a peaceful, elegiac rhythm, Leave No Trace is a ballad that celebrates and laments the end of childhood, a duet for teenage daughter and bruised father that does its work so patiently, so delicately, that we won’t discover its lasting effects until long after seeing it.
Will (Ben Foster) and Tom (Thomasin McKenzie) live deep in the woods of a national park near Portland, Oregon. Will is not a patriarch. A veteran of one of his country’s endless wars against the rest of the world, Will is simply incapable of supporting the commerce of his fellow men – with one exception, his daughter. Of their wife and mother, all that remains are memories, evoked laconically. Nothing else exists than their side-by-side.
The first part of the film is brief: Debra Granik depicts the existence of this woodland family. Tom took advantage of the skills acquired by his father in the army: shelter, food, hiding. She strives to put these lessons into practice with a wisdom that few adults know.
From time to time, they go to town, collect Will’s veteran’s pension, collect the psychotropic drugs he was prescribed, which he resells. But this green idyll is brutally interrupted by the park rangers, soon followed by social services. The questioning of Will and Tom sets the film on its very particular trajectory.
Forest Robinsons
The father and daughter may have gone through terrible misfortunes (the war, the death of the mother), their story will not be a tragedy. The rangers proceed with courtesy, the social workers show consideration for the child and the veteran. Debra Granik observes them with an almost documentary concern, full of empathy, which will reappear in the next chapter: the forest robinsons are placed in a Christmas tree plantation, near which lives a friendly teenager, whose hobby is to present her familiar bunny in beauty pageants.
After the pleasure of discovering these corners of the American landscape, Debra Granik delicately delivers the blow: although Will works for the happiness of children, Tom may become attached to the most reassuring of teenagers, there remains a gap between this world and their family that the patriarch once again refuses to fill, while his daughter would like to cross it once and for all. Leave No Trace will be less the story of a runaway than that of a child’s transition to womanhood.
You have 26.55% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.