Anthem to a New Land / Oscar Peterson & Michel Legrand

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Today, while checking Rotten Tomato listings for current films in town, I stumbled across a question asking if any film had ever received a 100% rating on Rotten Tomato. The answer was one film called Leave No Trace, released in 2018 but now streaming on Amazon and others. It was the only film with a 100% Rotten Tomato critics consensus (with something like 250 critics reviews).

So, I had to watch it on Amazon. The film features Will, a veteran suffering from PTSD, and his teenage daughter Tom. They are first seen in the old growth Forest Park in Portland, Oregon. They live in isolation, using forest survival skills and entering the town only occasionally for food and supplies. Will makes their money by selling his VA-issued benzodiazepines to another homeless veteran.

The two main characters are played brilliantly by Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie. There is incredible chemistry between them in one of the best performances I’ve ever seen. The film is a stunner. I felt the same way I felt when I first saw Year of Living Dangerously. How idid I miss this film that came out in May of 2018. It was one of the winners at Cannes and the two actors and director Debra Granik are interviewed at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival by Dave Karger. Granik’s previous film, Winter’s Bone, was nominated for four Oscars in 2011, including Best Picture. It was also thee vehicle for launching actress Jennifer Lawrence into stardom.

Thomasin McKenzie and Ben Foster

I decided to go back into my online journal of my life since 2018. Contained in the content posted to this Midnight Oil site. Specifically, I asked for for the posts to it during May 2018 when the film came out. Usually, there were a few posts a month at this time in the history of Midnight Oil blogs. But there were many posts to Midnight Oil in May 2018 so I was busy with topics in the posts and missed hearing about the film.

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One of the most interesting things about Leave No Trace is that there is little dialogue between father and daughter. The film is not at all concerned with orienting us into its cultural world like all other films do. Since there is little dialogue giving the usual “backstory” of the characters, it is left for the audience to figure this out. In this way, the viewer participates more in creating the meaning of the film.

A Home in the Forest

Along the way, there are a number of motifs in the film. There is the ecology and nature theme. In fact, the term “Leave No Trace,” sometimes written as LNT, is a set of ethics promoting conservation of the outdoors. Originating in the mid-20th century, the concept started as a movement in the United States in response to ecological damage caused by wilderness recreation. There is also the theme of homelessness of veterans. There is the motif of the of combat caused conditions like PTSD. In part, it is about the kindness of people who help those who have dropped out of society and are living off the grid.

But most of all, the film is about that moment when a child decides to leave home and go their own way. The film works toward a climatic moment in the forest between father and daughter. For the daughter, Tom, home is not a place but a person. The person is her father.

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Part of the magic of the film for me is that it spins viewers around and away from any particular orientation that culture defines. There’re few no “cultural” signs in the forest so it becomes difficult to judge the two in cultural terms. Words between the father and daughter are minimal so this traditional film device does not serve as it usually does to provide a background.

In many ways, Leave No Trace offers a Buddhist philosophy of life. It offers up a silence among the noise of culture. A type of Walden’s Pond space for a film. The silence of the film forces the audience to participate more in discovering the message of the film. I’m reminded of the “hot” and “cool” types of media Marshall McLuhan discussed in Understanding Media. He offered a reference to Sir Francis Bacon noting that:

“Francis Bacon never tired of contrasting hot and cool prose. Writing in ‘methods’ or complete packages, he contrasted with writing in aphorisms, or single observations such as ‘Revenge is a kind of wild justice.’ The passive consumer wants packages, but those, he suggested, who are concerned in pursuing knowledge and in seeking causes will resort to aphorisms, just because they are incomplete and require participation in depth.”

In effect, the film does not offer “complete packages” but offers a silence that is “incomplete” requiring “participation in depth.” The film is a masterwork in the film adage “Show don’t tell.” And, an example of that phrase from Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, “Speech is silver but silence is golden.” 

Silence is still golden to me. Perhaps it is also golden to others. But I wouldn’t call speech today anything near the quality of that high grade metal of silver Tolstoy initially assigned to it. Speech and its relationship to silver has only gone downhill in the past decades since Tolstoy’s study of it. When academics still mattered.

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One of the best reviews of Leave No Trace is by Karim Noorani in Unplugged Magazine

Another excellent review in Bright Wall/Dark Room by Carolyn Ten Eyck

Read an interview with the film’s brilliant cinematographer, Michael Mcdonough

Another Gorgeous Shot by Cinematographer Michael McDonough