{"id":9257,"date":"2018-08-02T20:15:16","date_gmt":"2018-08-03T01:15:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ragtagcinema.org\/blog\/?p=9257"},"modified":"2018-08-02T20:15:16","modified_gmt":"2018-08-03T01:15:16","slug":"westerly-a-review-series-leave-no-trace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/westerly-a-review-series-leave-no-trace\/","title":{"rendered":"Westerly \u2013 a review series: Leave No Trace"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Dr. Nancy West<\/a>, a longtime Ragtag member and Professor of English at The University of Missouri, offered to write about Ragtag films for our website, we immediately said yes. We love talking about films just about as much as we love watching them\u2014relating them to our lives, our favorite films, probing their philosophical depths and plot holes, and sharing other works by the same filmmakers and actors. But writing about them? We don't have time! So, enter Doctor West!<\/p>\n

You can think of these as reviews, thought pieces, or inspirations for your own discussions and exploration with friends and cinema staff.<\/p>\n

And, yes, viewer be advised: major plot points are discussed below.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Leave No Trace<\/em> may be my favorite film of the year. It\u2019s by Debra Granik, the same director who made Winter\u2019s Bone<\/em> (otherwise known as Missouri: Land of Meth and Squirrel Hunters<\/em>). I remember watching Winter\u2019s Bone<\/em> at Ragtag eight years ago, blown away by its performances, small-scale storytelling, and the documentary way it depicted an off-the-grid community. I had the same reaction to Leave No Trace<\/em>, though I think it\u2019s an even better film: bolder, quieter, and subtler.<\/p>\n

For those of you who haven\u2019t yet seen Leave No Trace<\/em>, I\u2019ll provide a bite-sized summary. Will (Ben Foster) and his 13-year-old daughter, Tom (Thomasin McKenzie), live in the woods of Forest Park, a 5200 nature preserve in Portland, Oregon. The opening sequences of the film convey that they have been happy there, attuned to nature and each other. They grow vegetables, play chess, build fires, read outdated encyclopedias. All seems well enough until local authorities pick them up, forcing them to \u201cadapt\u201d to the outside world. Leave No Trace<\/em> is based on Peter Rock\u2019s 2009 novel, My Abandonment<\/em>, which was itself inspired by the astonishing story of a father and daughter who lived, undetected, in the park for four years.<\/p>\n

Like Winter\u2019s Bone, Leave No Trace<\/em> is a character-driven movie. And yet one of its strengths\u2014though some of you may disagree\u2014is its refusal to provide a backstory on Will and Tom. We never learn how they became homeless, nor which war Will served in. We\u2019re never told what caused the PTSD that obviously forces his need for isolation nor what happened to Tom\u2019s mother. \u201cI wish I could remember her,\u201d Tom says\u2014and that sad vacancy remains just that. It\u2019s rare to find such gaps in a Hollywood film, especially one whose subject is homelessness. Social exclusion always begs the question of what caused it (and, in film, tends to engender that overused technique known as the flashback; thankfully, we don\u2019t get a single one here).<\/p>\n

An equally daring aspect of Leave No Trace<\/em> is how it pares down dialogue. Will and Tom are quiet characters; in fact, most of the characters in Leave No Trace<\/em> are quiet (now here\u2019s an interesting question: why is it that some of 2018\u2019s most memorable films\u2014Wonderstruck, A Quiet Place<\/em>, and now Leave No Trace<\/em>\u2014employ so much silence?).\u00a0 And yet, despite the wordlessness, I felt like I knew<\/em> these two characters and believed in the deep, loving bond between them. Much of this goes to Granik\u2019s direction, but it is also due to Foster and McKenzie, whose performances feel almost symbiotic.<\/p>\n

After seeing a preview of Leave No Trace<\/em> weeks ago, I was skeptical, worried it would be yet another preachy film about the shallowness of contemporary culture. But Leave No Trace<\/em> isn\u2019t a sociological treatise. It\u2019s an allegory, a story about human existence that contains any number of stories within it. Coming-of-age, quest, tragedy, journey and return: they\u2019re all there, within the silences.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Dr. Nancy West, a longtime Ragtag member and Professor of English at The University of Missouri, offered to write about Ragtag films for our website, we immediately said yes. We love talking about films just about as much as we love watching them\u2014relating them to our lives, our favorite films, probing their philosophical depths […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news1"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9257\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ragtagcinema.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}