Granik and DP Michael McDonough are alive to the setting’s majesty, their naturalistic images brimming with vibrant greens and conjuring a cool dampness you feel in your bones. Instead, bits of background information are doled out with merciful understatement, allowing us to piece together a rationale: Will’s choice to remove himself and his daughter from society is an act both of ideology (a rejection of consumer-capitalist excess) and of psychological self-preservation (a need for utmost peace after the trauma of war). The screenplay, adapted by Granik and Anne Rosellini, doesn’t spell out how or why Will and Tom ended up here, a kind of modern-day, woods-dwelling Prospero and Miranda. Their camp looks makeshift, but the ease with which they navigate the wilderness and the casual intimacy of their interactions suggest this has long been the way they’ve lived. With typical economy, Granik shows them going about the business of survival: picking plants and mushrooms to eat, “feathering” wood for fire, boiling eggs, catching rain water to drink. We first see Will and Tom living in a sprawling public park in the mountains outside Portland, Oregon. The filmmaker has crafted an unusual coming-of-age tale, in which a teen declares independence from her parent gradually, gingerly, with tact and consideration rather than rebelliousness. Though the narrative is built around conflict - one person’s desire for isolation clashing with another’s craving for community - its quietly wrenching power stems not from any sense of right versus wrong, but from Granik’s ability to make you understand both people.
Based on Peter Rock’s 2009 novel My Abandonment, the movie centers on the chasm that opens up between a fiercely close father and daughter: PTSD-afflicted veteran and widower Will ( Ben Foster), who insists on living apart from the world, and teenager Tom ( Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie), who finds herself yearning to join it. That compassion fills every frame of Leave No Trace, Granik’s tough-minded, touching new drama. She doesn’t approach her marginalized characters as objects of curiosity or comedy, derision or pity she comes at them straight-on, with clear-eyed, unsentimental compassion. But with Granik’s films, unlike some of those aforementioned, you don’t feel the distance between director and milieu. Since the rise of Trump, these citizens (and oh-so-hot election commodities) have been on the receiving end of renewed fascination in newspaper pages - and, less fetishistically, though unmistakably, in movies like Logan Lucky, The Florida Project, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and I, Tonya.
With just a few films - about a strung-out mother in Down to the Bone, Ozark meth cookers in Winter’s Bone and a motorcycle-riding Vietnam vet in the documentary Stray Dog - Debra Granik has carved out a niche as one of American cinema’s foremost chroniclers of the white poor and working class.