What does home mean? Do I need a roof and walls? Do I need to have all the amenities? Can home be simply composed of the bond – the connection – between me and a loved one? For the past few weeks we’ve been forced to do a lot of contemplation – and while watching Debra Granik’s deeply moving film “Leave No Trace” – those questions were echoing within me. Adapted from the 2009 book “My Abandonment” by Peter Rock – and based on an actual event – “Leave No Trace” concentrates on a father, a veteran with PTSD, and daughter who live off the grid — in Portland, Ore.’s Forest Park. No internet, no news. Simply living off the land on a day to day basis – their essential needs down to a minimum. Doesn’t this sound enticing right about now? One day they’re spotted – and they’re forced to reintegrate into civilization. The movie is stunningly beautiful to look at – slowly simmering to an emotional ending – as the father’s determination to remain closed off from the world never wavers while the daughter’s perspective opens. Granik proves once again her phenomenal handling of actors.
Granik, who’d previously directed the Oscar-nominated “Winter’s Bone”, makes social realist films inspired by her research on a particular community (the Ozarks in “Winter’s Bone”) – drawing attention to real socio-political conditions in the US. In “Leave No Trace” – she draws us into the specific world of veterans who are homeless in the Pacific Northwest. We follow this father – Will (played by a marvelously restrained Ben Foster) and daughter – Tom – (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie in her star-making debut) without judgment. The camera reveals them to us episodically – allowing us to observe – make our own assessments and fill in the facts that are not given to us. Granik is gentle and intelligent. She presents us the two characters enveloped in the Forest Park that is photographed like a garden of Eden. Cinematographically I’ve never seen more shades of green on the screen. You can feel this place, this forest. There’s so much texture and patterns. As a viewer your senses of wonder and curiosity are engaged. Why are they living this way? They seem happy? Where’s the mother? Things go unanswered – and in the ambiguity you start to find answers and interpretation.
There’s no villain in this story. There’s no one out to get this family, there’s no one that wants to see them harmed or apprehended. Actually, throughout the movie you see people reaching out to them. As we were introduced to a cattle auction in “Winter’s Bone”, “Leave No Trace” shows a 4-H agricultural program – a youth organization that tries to engage the daughter.
The modern world starts to infringe in the relationship between Will and daughter Tom. There are reverberations of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”, Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” and Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” “Everything’s different now,” Tom acknowledges to her father halfway through the film. “We can still think our own thoughts,” he replies. Moments that are very realistic – play out poetically and resonantly. There’s an extraordinary scene that entails learning about a beehive. The beekeeper explains to the daughter about the beehive – about community – “It means a lot that I have their trust.”
Granik is a director I encourage you to encounter. She’s quite an artist.
Tom: “A person can withstand 500 stings. You don’t have to be scared.”
Love,
Roger
Available to rent on YouTube, Google Play, Vudu and Amazon Prime.
Screenplay by Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini
Directed by Debra Granik
Starring: Ben Foster, Thomasin McKenzie, Jeff Kober and Dale Dickey
109 minutes
About Director Debra Granik
“Debra Granik started working in film and video in the Boston grassroots media movement in the late 80’s. She studied politics at Brandeis University and her first forays into operating a camera and collaborating on political documentation were with Boston based media groups such as the Women’s Video Collective. While in Boston she had the good fortune to be able to take classes at Mass College of Art, Studio for Interrelated Media, which exposed her to a great variety of film work and traditions. Granik shot and produced educational programs related to workplace health and safety issues for local trade unions and for the Massachusetts Division of Occupational Safety. After clocking considerable time in the world of educational media production, she had the chance to work on several long form documentaries by Boston based filmmakers. From there, she moved to NYC to attend New York University’s Graduate Film Program, seeking a way to inter-relate her interest in real-life experience and story structure, which she found in the film tradition of neo-realism, through a mentor at NYU. At NYU, she made several short films, one of which, Snake Feed, garnered an award at Sundance, which led to involvement in the Sundance Screenwriting and Directing Labs. She expanded the story from Snake Feed into a longer script which formed the basis for the feature Down to the Bone, created with her producing partner, Anne Rosellini. Down to the Bone was awarded the Best Director prize at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. Her next film, Winter’s Bone, was nominated for four Oscars, including Best Picture, and won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. Granik and co-writer Anne Rosellini were Oscar nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. (NYU Tisch) Her film, Leave No Trace, which she directed and co-wrote, was released in 2018.
From Page to Screen
In an interview with Deadline, Director Debra Granik discusses the origins of Leave No Trace. “I was presented with the novel, My Abandonment. The author is Peter Rock, who’s local to Portland. He’s a regional writer and knows a lot about Portland culture; he includes it in his novels. He had been intrigued by an article that showed up in the newspaper of Portland, The Oregonian, in which the authorities expressed surprise at discovering a father and daughter that were living in this public park. A very beloved public park, a large public park that is adjacent to the city of Portland. You can walk in and out of the park, into the city, back into the park. It’s a massive municipal park, and they were baffled that this family could live for so long undetected. Why was smoke never seen from their fire? Why did they take such care to cover their tracks? [The father] was using “gray man” techniques of living, and it was effective.” (Deadline)
The Making of Leave No Trace
“This story was told in a really, really specific place, which was a very large municipal park on the outskirts of Portland,” Granik says. “We went there, we talked to the rangers, we started to talk to social workers, started to talk to cops, detectives. So those become the waitress, those become the real person.… That anecdotal content married to the book is what starts to form the new version.” Hollywood doesn’t always like to take chances on fresh faces, especially ones untested in the American marketplace. But Granik needed a “willingness” from her leads to help shape the roles, a quality she says isn’t always present in “jaded” actors. “A role is never just a ready-made thing,” she says. “They are going to be informing it and shaping it so hugely that I need to see some signs there that that’s something exciting to them.” Seventeen-year-old New Zealand actress Thomasin McKenzie and Ben Foster were Granik’s first choices — and her financiers, Bron Studios and First Look, were surprisingly on board. “We worked with a lot of different lists that were more secure for them, more appealing, more standard-issue in terms of financeable,” Granik says, “and they were willing to go with our choice.” That was part of the “progression of clicks” that made her realize this project on her wish list would actually be made. “They were really people of their word. [The film] wasn’t contingent on a whole bunch of things, it didn’t have stipulations attached to it. They were very honorable people in the film-finance world, and that’s kind of exciting. So the click was that we were working with no shell companies, no people who were in it for the wrong reasons.” (Entertainment Weekly)