Leave No Trace (Debra Granik, 2018)

The beginning of this film irritated me. It gave me something of the feeling I also got watching The Revenant: I'm sure all this practical information (largely about how to build a fire in the woods, in this case) will be useful to me if I ever have to survive outdoors for an extended period, but being a pale and pasty indoors type who was never a Boy Scout, should such a thing happen I'd probably just chuck the towel in at the first opportunity. But things picked up after that, and the narrative – concerning a father (Ben Foster) traumatised by military service who is attempting to bring up his daughter off the grid (he has to try to leave no trace because of the traces that war has left on him) – turns out to be, on the microlevel, surprisingly unpredictable. The pair return to "civilisation" far earlier than I was expecting, for example. Performances throughout the film are excellent, in particular Thomasin McKensie as Tom, the young daughter, who can pack a great deal into an expression without exuding the impression that she's "acting". There were small irritations. The father's hair and beard remain neatly trimmed through the entire film, which I'm sure removed some continuity concerns while editing, but I found a distraction. Also, everybody that the pair meet is, in different ways, kind and helpful, and while this allowed the film to sidestep obvious clichés of narrative development and to attempt to put the blame for the father's state on "the system" rather than on individuals, it did clash with the film's desire for realism. (Although maybe not entirely – Richard Brody comments in The New Yorker that the film's narrative is that "white people keep giving a white man houses"; it's not clear quite how self-aware the film is about this.) Across its duration the film had me oscillating – between, for example, finding the cinematography usefully (undistractingly) neutral, and simply finding it unremarkable (there is nothing of the poetry that Kelly Reichardt, in the same neck of the Pacific Northwest woods, found in Old Joy, for example). Or oscillating between admiring the directness of the narrative (the only really in-your-face metaphor involves a beehive, but mostly the film eschews underlining its points in such ways) and wanting more to get my teeth into. The balance that the film strikes is unusual. Ordinarily, films that employ such a distanced narration also strive for richness and ambiguity, but here narrative delicacy is combined with an almost complete lack of ambiguity. (Which is not to say that the film is not subtle, because subtlety and ambiguity are not the same thing.) Possibly, on a second viewing, I would find this a remarkable achievement, but on a first viewing Leave No Trace falls between two stools in an interesting but ultimately frustrating way.