Marshall and the Movies

There’s an overarching gentleness in Debra Granik’s “Leave No Trace,” one that’s commendable alone for being practically unrecognizable in today’s culture. The titular phrase does not quite encapsulate the writer/director’s approach to the film, but if her style took on human form, it would not audibly rustle any leaves in the sylvan setting. Even compared to Kelly Reichardt, another restrained humanist director working heavily in the Pacific Northwest, Granik’s naturalism pierces our senses by treading ever so lightly on them.

I knew little about this project or its origins before viewing it – always a wonderful luxury – was surprised to learn in the closing credits that Granik, along with her fellow Oscar-nominated co-writer of “Winter’s Bone,” Anne Rosellini, adapted the film from a novel. While “Leave No Trace” peers deeply into the souls of the two central characters, the film contains scarcely any of the psychological underpinnings necessary to keep a story alive on the page.

Ben Foster’s Will, a homeless veteran living with his daughter Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie) off the grid in Oregon, clearly carries some baggage to inspire such a drastic break with social norms. Yet Granik refuses to turn his internal anguish into fuel for the narrative. Will is not a mystery for us to solve. He simply is.

Granik seems to view her role as not to film these characters, stand off to the side, and ask why they do what they do. “Leave No Trace” is unobtrusive almost to the point of fault, letting the world of the film breathe, unfurling and concealing itself in equal measure. She relishes in the unhurried moments and languorous journeys without resorting to Slow Cinema tactics of deliberate, self-conscious audience alienation.

Foster tempers his usual wild man tendencies to vibrate along Granik’s wavelength here, and the contrast with something like “Hell or High Water” proves striking. But the film belongs to relative newcomer McKenzie, who captures the pains of maturation with an added layer of confusion stemming from years of social isolation. Granik never sensationalizes Tom watching peers take an endless stream of selfies or listening to girls at a foster home deride her previous lifestyle in the woods as being homeless. She doesn’t have to because McKenzie can express that wild rush of contradictory emotions in her wide, wondrous eyes and such searingly authentic gestures as the quivering of a chin. B /