LEAVE NO TRACE – Review

Writer/director Debra Granik, whose 2010 art-house hit WINTER’S BONE introduced us to Jennifer Lawrence, has far less success with her follow-up LEAVE NO TRACE, a plodding and forgettable war-at-home  drama. Ben Foster stars as Will, an Iraq vet who’s given up on a conventional lifestyle and lives in the woods, away from the burdens of civilization. Though the audience is given few details about his past, it’s clear Will and his other forest-dwelling friends suffer from PTSD and just want to be left alone. The problem is Will has his 15-year old daughter Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie) living out there with him, and though he may want to raise his daughter his own way, the authorities have other ideas. Will is a decent teacher for his daughter, teaching Tom to fend for herself in the wild and she is being educated, but what she’s lacking is any peer companionship. Another problem is that they’re living in Forest Park, a wilderness preserve near Portland, Oregon, so he’s not as far off the grid as he needs to be, making it fairly easy for the police to track them down. The pair is placed in ‘society’, with structure and responsibility and everything suddenly changes for Tom. They find housing on a Christmas Tree farm but it’s not an adjustment that Will can make and he decides, for both, to leave the security and resume their former life, but that plan stalls when he suffers a serious injury.  Tom is taken in by a commune of strangers and while her dad recovers, she is embraced by the simple life and affection of its members.

Based on the novel My Abandonment by Peter Rock, LEAVE NO TRACE has been made with obvious devotion and sincerity, but I found it overly-familiar and meandering. Granik gives her actors and story more than enough room to breathe by adopting a calm, observational shooting style and allowing scenes to run naturally and find their feet. It’s just that they never do. It takes two-thirds of the film for any scene of real emotional truth or power to emerge – and by then, I’d lost interest. I never felt any true father-daughter chemistry between the two leads, or the strong feeling of trust and affection that illustrate the love of a parent and child. Ben Foster excels at playing these tightly-wound combustible types, but his Will is given little dialog so the actor must express himself through pursed lips and haunted eyes. This works for a while, but eventually Will emerges as a rather one-note character. Ms McKenzie has received a lot of praise for her performance here, but to me Tom is just another of the type of overly-wise youth we too often see in film. The actress is fine but the script is weak and the character doesn’t ring true. LEAVE NO TRACE is a well-meaning film that never quite pulls itself together and I can’t recommend it.

2 of 5 Stars