Review: ‘Leave No Trace’ Is a Very American Story About Survival

The dense green foliage that surrounds the man and his daughter in “Leave No Trace” seems to hold them as if in sheltering arms. It is a blissful, serene scene, one set to the sounds of human movement and the familiar natural buzzing, chirping and whirring. The tall mossy trees and carpet of ferns suggest that it is the Pacific Northwest, somewhere deep in the woods. Father and daughter seem to be camping — there are tarps as well as a fire pit, though no car or other people in sight — but then the girl sits on a plastic milk crate and the two settle into the site they call home.

Director Debra Granik has a gift for cinematic spaces that are vibrantly, palpably alive, and for putting you in places, whether modest homes or the great outdoors, that make you feel as if you are standing right alongside her characters. In “Leave No Trace,” she immediately sets you down in a forest that is so inviting, so tranquil, that it seems like utopia and all the possibilities that wistful, elusive ideal implies. Look, she seems to say as the camera pulls up and away — and cuts the two human travelers down to humble size — look at all this grandeur, all this unspoiled beauty. Don’t you want in?

The title evokes the ethos embraced by experienced campers and others who know the true way to love nature is to do no harm. (Pack it in, pack it out.) In “Leave No Trace,” the words also come to mean something more disturbing and difficult, namely the desire and sometimes the need to be so far apart from civilization that you are profoundly, perhaps permanently outside it. When the movie opens, the young teenage girl, Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie), and her father, Will (Ben Foster), are not just living — foraging, surviving, apparently thriving — in the forest, they are existing in a state of willed invisibility.

In “Leave No Trace,” Granik explores what it means to be so far on the margins you might as well not exist at all, at least as far as the larger world is concerned. It is a familiar concern for Granik, who is drawn to American outsiders — intentional and unintentional exiles alike — living in what are often blandly called poor and marginalized communities. These are the people who populate her stories and bring them to tangibly real life in dramatic movies like “Winter’s Bone,” set in the Ozark Mountains in rural Missouri, and in her documentary “Stray Dog,” which centers on a gruffly warm biker and Vietnam veteran who radically defies stereotype.

Shortly after the movie begins, a swarm of police and social-service types crashes Tom and Will’s makeshift sanctuary, destroying it. After a brief interrogation, father and daughter are relocated to a modest house adjacent to a tree farm. There, under supervision — the main caseworker is a kindly, stubborn meddler — Will works for the owner helping harvest trees while Tom, her curiosity blossoming as her world expands, explores their new home. She learns how to ride a bike, a donation that Will initially refuses, and meets a boy (Isaiah Stone). He is building a tiny house (self-reliance is one of the movie’s refrains) and introduces her to 4-H (community is another).

Based on the novel “My Abandonment,” by Peter Rock, “Leave No Trace” opens up gradually, much like Tom does. Written by Granik and Anne Rosellini, it follows a fairly straight narrative line that occasionally heads down seeming detours that subtly enrich its realism. When Will and Tom visit a Veterans Affairs facility in an early scene, Granik visually underscores the building’s chilly institutionalism yet also reminds you of the people inside it. Because when Tom speaks to one man, the point is not so much their talk but all the veterans around them who — having once served with others — seem to now wait and roam, on foot and in wheelchairs, in pronounced isolation.

Throughout, Granik brings you into worlds within worlds and puts her loners in sight of communities, creating a dynamic that pushes the story forward and pulls at Tom and Will. Other people continually tug at this insistently quiet, intimate movie (you hear birds and human breath alike), unsettling the seclusion that Will, freely or by necessity, has escaped into with Tom. And while his name sounds meaningful, it is not easily decoded. Granik is interested in free will or its illusion — a grimy Palestinian scarf Will wears points to military time served in the Middle East and the haunted history he continues to carry with him — but she is also asking what we owe to other people.

“Leave No Trace” is only Granik’s third fiction feature, and she is still finding ways to create and sustain narrative tension without the kind of genre beats that helped give “Winter’s Bone” its forward thrust. (Her feel for down-home alienation and the charisma of that movie’s breakout star, Jennifer Lawrence, did their part.) Here, Granik instead employs a restraint that worked so well in her documentary “Stray Dog.” She looks hard and by looking encourages us to see the beauty — and meaning — in the everyday: the velvety moss on a tree, the opalescent shimmer of a spider web and the tenderness that envelops Will and Tom, sustaining them and a story that occasionally drifts.

In its best moments, “Leave No Trace” invites you to simply be with its characters, to see and experience the world as they do. Empathy, the movie reminds you, is something that is too little asked of you either in life or in art. Both Foster’s and Harcourt McKenzie’s sensitive, tightly checked performances are critical in this regard; he holds you close to Will by keeping the character boarded up even as she draws you to Tom with anxious discretion and a heartbreaking vocal tremulousness that sometimes speaks louder than words. Neither actor begs for your heart, but each — like this movie — takes it.

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‘Leave No Trace’

Rated PG for mild physical peril and a sense of outsider anguish. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes.