“Leave No Trace” Film Review
Whether an environmental advocate or not Leave No Trace inspires viewers with a family’s carbon footprint that is seemingly fantastical albeit in the most natural of ways. In modern times it is most common to see people returning to a more regionalist, rural lifestyle in order to escape the elements of rigid metropolitan society. These people society frames as those who couldn’t cope and implies that they can not keep up with the “fittest” ones who remain in civilized society. So too in the film a father Will makes his home in a state park with his daughter Tom because of his struggle with PTSD.
It makes sense that very few would choose Will and Tom’s lifestyle out of a need for mere adventure and wanderlust, and so the film does something interesting by taking a societal wrecca and challenging society’s view of this form of ostracism; It tracks how Will’s coping mechanism with PTSD over time becomes almost a life choice.
The audience is slowly drawn into Will and Tom’s primitive life. Initially, the decrepit camp in which they live is jarring to viewers but with time arguably charms even the most urbane. If the long shots of glistening spiderwebs and emerald hues don’t cast its spell on viewers, then the father-daughter dynamic just might. There is something tribally beautiful about Will and Tom’s relationship that could only be produced from such a close co-survivorship. Each intuits the others wants and needs and feels the other’s emotions and this is especially observed in the physical dramatics of the characters.
Tom’s resistance to the intervening social workers displays a naivete to the glories of the civilized world but more importantly an inherent understanding of the word, home. Because of her childhood, Tom now has the remarkable ability to make herself a home anywhere she is placed. She develops adaptability that only professional wanderers and travelers can really master, but the fact that she has achieved this at such a young age speaks to the flaws of socializing people from a young age in a chaotic, uncertain, and random world.
On the surface Leave No Trace is simplistic in its message and aesthetics. Debra Granik and her team piece together a work that presents an alternative take on the art of domesticity in the modern world. It leaves the audience pondering their own home lives and how they may affect the type of relationship people share with their families and thus the families around them.
