‘Leave No Trace’
Rating: PG for “thematic elements throughout”Running time: 109 minutes
Like the pleasures of slow cooking, purposefully slow cinema can be a welcome respite from the craziness in both our world and multiplexes. And that is exactly what you’ll get with filmmaker Debra Granik’s “Leave No Trace,” a poetic and low-key drama about a father and his teenage daughter whose attempt to live outside of society becomes increasingly impossible.
Granik, you might recall, is the co-writer and director the 2010 film “Winter’s Bone,” a stunning exercise in mood and setting that she made for a lean $2 million. But that film is most remembered these days for putting star Jennifer Lawrence on the map (and a permanent Oscars track). Granik, meanwhile, faded into the background, and seemed in danger of becoming a footnote in Lawrence’s incredible ascent – just another female casualty of a biased Hollywood system.
“Leave No Trace,” starring Ben Foster as Will, and the entrancing newcomer Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie, as his 13-year-old daughter, Tom, is Granik’s first narrative feature since “Winter’s Bone.” And, frankly, it’s nice to have her unique sensibilities and quietly assured vision back. Who else would be confident enough to make a meditative two character drama that gets a tame PG rating? She’s not concerned about flash, or edge or darkness for darkness sakes, just humanity.
Cinema is not lacking for stories about fathers whose antiestablishment lifestyles are threatened or questioned when their children reach a certain age. Think “Running on Empty” or “Captain Fantastic” or even “The Glass Castle.” Usually the patriarch is larger than life – a charismatic screw-up, lovable alcoholic or just all-around eccentric character. In “Leave No Trace,” however, Will is hardly more than a shell of a person, concerned only with his and his daughter’s basic survival needs.