With the 2010s' candle burning out, I thought it worth looking back on
my favourite movies of the past ten years. It may have been a relatively
uninspiring decade for mainstream cinema, but even the weakest year had
a few standout releases worth celebrating. This post covers the second placed movie.
#2: LEAVE NO TRACE (Dir: Debra Granik, 2018)
Debra Granik's follow-up to Winter's Bone is a similarly stripped down, emotionally raw tale of a young woman living on the wild edges of civilisation, in intensely masculine environments, fighting for the survival of herself and her loved ones. Despite the similarities in their setting, Winter's Bone and Leave No Trace are diametrically opposed in the details.
Winter's Bone is a story about community, where a girl, Dee, is forced into adulthood to protect her small, destitute family following the disappearance of her meth-addicted father. Dee's battle for survival is based on her ability to fight through not only the bonds of poverty, but the institutions and criminal gangs which have evolved to take advantage of that poverty. In Leave No Trace, daughter Tom's life is defined not by the disappearance of her veteran father, Will, but his omnipresence. They are each other's entire worlds, living off the grid in national parks as a consequence of his trauma-induced fear of civilisation. Dee's story is about her protecting her family from the cruelty of society around her; Tom's is about her discovering the care and safety that society can offer.
Both films stand in stark contrast to the fatuous and patronising 'girl power' feminism presently miring popular culture. Dee and Tom's existences are weighed upon by the struggles and failings of the men around them and theirs are lives of resilience, responsibility and care in the face of often overwhelming hardship. The concept of female empowerment is commonly thrown around as a suggestion that women can do anything a man can do, usually by becoming de facto men themselves. Granik's films recognise female power as distinct from that of men. Dee and Tom hold their own under a suffocating cloud of male criminality and trauma (respectively) not by equalling men's physical power but through negotiation, collaboration and unwavering determination to improve the lives of themselves and their loved ones. They come into their own as their reliance on men as physical protectors and leaders is torn away, leaving them to survive and, as far as they are able, succeed in environments with little precedent or recognition of the worth of their values and strength.
Granik is far from unsympathetic to her men: indeed, Leave No Trace portrays with great understanding male struggles with failure and abandonment, isolationism and family. It is as nuanced a film about the struggles of men as it is about women's strength in existing in male-dominated worlds. The film is Dee's story, in her coming to terms with the realisation that she cannot let her father's trauma define her life as well as his, but through Will it tells a story of how civilisation has suffocated a certain type of freedom and self-sufficiency. For all the mental damage and confusion that his wartime experience has wrought on him - and Tom, by proxy - it grants Will a twisted sense of clarity in seeing how society boxes its people up, a willing if uncomprehending imprisonment in unnatural structures and geometries. The oppression of the straight line.
Winter's Bone is a story about community, where a girl, Dee, is forced into adulthood to protect her small, destitute family following the disappearance of her meth-addicted father. Dee's battle for survival is based on her ability to fight through not only the bonds of poverty, but the institutions and criminal gangs which have evolved to take advantage of that poverty. In Leave No Trace, daughter Tom's life is defined not by the disappearance of her veteran father, Will, but his omnipresence. They are each other's entire worlds, living off the grid in national parks as a consequence of his trauma-induced fear of civilisation. Dee's story is about her protecting her family from the cruelty of society around her; Tom's is about her discovering the care and safety that society can offer.
Both films stand in stark contrast to the fatuous and patronising 'girl power' feminism presently miring popular culture. Dee and Tom's existences are weighed upon by the struggles and failings of the men around them and theirs are lives of resilience, responsibility and care in the face of often overwhelming hardship. The concept of female empowerment is commonly thrown around as a suggestion that women can do anything a man can do, usually by becoming de facto men themselves. Granik's films recognise female power as distinct from that of men. Dee and Tom hold their own under a suffocating cloud of male criminality and trauma (respectively) not by equalling men's physical power but through negotiation, collaboration and unwavering determination to improve the lives of themselves and their loved ones. They come into their own as their reliance on men as physical protectors and leaders is torn away, leaving them to survive and, as far as they are able, succeed in environments with little precedent or recognition of the worth of their values and strength.
Granik is far from unsympathetic to her men: indeed, Leave No Trace portrays with great understanding male struggles with failure and abandonment, isolationism and family. It is as nuanced a film about the struggles of men as it is about women's strength in existing in male-dominated worlds. The film is Dee's story, in her coming to terms with the realisation that she cannot let her father's trauma define her life as well as his, but through Will it tells a story of how civilisation has suffocated a certain type of freedom and self-sufficiency. For all the mental damage and confusion that his wartime experience has wrought on him - and Tom, by proxy - it grants Will a twisted sense of clarity in seeing how society boxes its people up, a willing if uncomprehending imprisonment in unnatural structures and geometries. The oppression of the straight line.
No review of Leave No Trace can be completed with a mention of its two stars, Thomasin Mackenzie and Ben Foster, who are as extraordinary individually as they are as a pair. Tom and Will's relationship is one of intense dependency, as loving as it is damaging. That bond is reflected in Mackenzie and Foster mirroring each other in body language and closeness to a degree both endearing and unnerving. It is a credit to each of them that for much of the film it can be described as one performance by two people in the same shot. Perhaps that duality is why Mackenzie's career has not enjoyed the same immediate ascendancy as that of Jennifer Lawrence following Winter's Bone. If anything, Mackenzie only exceeds Lawrence's already high bar.
Leave No Trace not sweeping the board at the 2018 Oscars would be disgraceful enough. That it did not receive a single nomination is criminal. I'll soon be writing up my top choice for film of the decade, but the margins between that film and this one - despite being polar opposites in every other possible respect - are so marginal as to be an effective draw. Leave No Trace looks profoundly into life and love in the most intimate detail and is an accomplishment in writing and filmmaking that, irrespective of its ranking on this list, should never be considered second best.
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Top Ten Movies Of The Decade: Numbers 10 - 8
Top Ten Movies Of The Decade: Numbers 5 - 4
Top Ten Movies Of The Decade: Number Three
