Tracking the tale of a veteran of our ongoing Middle-East wars, who, together with his teenage daughter, is living completely off the grid in the middle of a Pacific Northwest national park, Granik's movie (the filmmaker is shown at right) will bring to mind last year's wonderful Captain Fantastic, in which Viggo Mortensen's single-dad character led his large family in a similarly themed adventure, much more comic and encompassing of people, places and things. As lovely and generous as that film was, Leave No Trace is by far the stronger movie. In its narrower view -- it is mostly a two-hander with an occasional supporting character popping up as necessary -- it also probes much deeper the relationship between father and daughter, discovering how the needs of the latter must finally and necessarily supersede those of the former.
In the leading roles, you could not ask for better performances than from the always fine Ben Foster (above, as dad) and Thomasin McKenzie (below, as daughter Tom). The two of them make each moment between them as real as you could want, and the sense of their being long-time "family" is so strong that it makes the movie's final scene among the most honest -- and wrenching -- that movies have given us in a long while.
The story is told in a seamless, event-filled manner in which those events are perfectly believable. There's never a question of doubting what happens here. Best of all, there are no real villains, either. The state does what it must -- but with as much decency and care as can be mustered. And the few people encountered along the journey taken by the pair are brought to lovely life by very well-cast actors doing the expected and exacting job.
Time restraints, along with a suddenly moved-ahead release date down here in South Florida, mean that I cannot spend the time I would like discussing the film. So I'll just say, see it as soon as you can, and don't read too much more about it beforehand.
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