Alerted by the barking hounds, dad snaps: “This is not a drill” and his daughter, Tom, grabs what she can and runs. But the sniffing dogs and the police handlers close the net around them in the thick woods. Busted for the crime of living on public land, they are brought to a social service center in nearby Portland, a drab gray jungle compared to the woodlands they called home. But the story isn’t over. Their flight has only begun.
The enigma at the heart of Leave No Trace is gradually but never entirely clarified. Mom is a barely acknowledged absence. Clues that dad (Ben Foster) served in one of America’s recent inconclusive wars are verified without specifics; a PTSD diagnosis is premature. Maybe he’s just sick and tired and wants to opt out—to check none of the above for the rest of his life. “Are you a strong team player?” the psychologist asks. Dad pauses: “I used to be.”
What’s evident is that dad and Tom (Thomasin McKenzie) care for and support each other in a loving family bond tested by dad’s insistence on living outside the limits of a society in which he no longer believes. They play chess and read together in their forest tent. Her intelligence tests higher than average. However, after she’s caught, the social worker insists that Tom must go to school.
Although he reveals no ideology—no paranoia about an impending apocalypse, race war or world dictatorship—dad is as skilled a survivalist as anyone since Davy Crockett. He can kindle sparks from friction and cook a meal over the fire. He knows which leaves are edible and how to suck water from plants. Gathering and gleaning, dad and daughter are able to live outside the edge of the settled world.
With bureaucratic compassion, the social worker sends them to a Christmas tree farm where a decent-enough taskmaster puts dad to work with a saw. But for dad a life of distracting possessions, the cellphones he refuses, the TV he pushes into a closet, the alienation of labor and the forced-friendly evangelical church the taskmaster points him to, is a prison. They sneak off again and make for higher ground.
The conflict in Leave No Trace is between dad’s desire to free himself from society and Tom’s need for friendship and community. Directed and co-written by Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone), Leave No Trace teases with Hollywood solutions (will Tom fall in love with the boy from 4-H?) before following a more idiosyncratic trail. While lacking the coherent drama of Winter’s Bone, Leave No Trace glances sideways at rural America in decay—at homeless camps being bulldozed, hoboes riding freight cars and Greyhounds and a community in the woods whose members have decided to escape the grid of contemporary life. Leave No Trace is a dark journey brightened by the redeeming goodness that persists in human nature and the low-key realism of the performances by Foster and McKenzie.
