Movie Review: Leave No Trace

See the Film March 17, 2019

Goldie Eder, LICSW, BCD

Leave No Trace (2018), directed by Debra Granik, tells the story of Will (Ben Foster) and Tom (Thomasine Harcourt McKenzie), a father and adolescent daughter living on their own in the woods. We experience the mutual engagement needed for the pair to survive physically, and the air of cooperation and attunement between father and daughter is palpable. There is mutual trust and affirmation. Ensconced in their tent, the pair say goodnight with a sequential clicking sound that sounds very personal, signifying connection and safety.

The idyll we experience, if it is one, is soon disrupted by the sound of heavy machinery, saws, and unbidden strangers. Tom alerts her dad and they immediately go into hiding, a drill they have practiced. Is this the trigger for Will’s nightmare that awakens him that night? Will and Tom are indeed captured by police upon their return from town for groceries—we learn that they live in a park in Portland, Oregon. They each are traumatized by their separation at the hands of the authorities, but what seem like benevolent social workers assess them and connect them with a Portland resident who needs help on his farm. The duo is then confronted with how to adapt to their new surroundings. Tom asks her father to try to adapt, and at first, he promises to—but as she ventures out more, meeting a peer, and Will does the requisite work for their “benefactor,” Tom begins to feel ambivalent about joining a larger social world.

What I find so compelling and instructive about this story is the interplay between attachment, parentification, and development in this coming of age story. Tom learns self-reliance from her father, and yet she respects his authority and his autonomy, unconflicted, at first, as many adolescents seem to be in relation to their parents by that time. Tom eventually learns more historical context that helps to explain her father’s behavior, and when he announces to her that it is time for them to leave, she is able to differentiate herself from him and follow her own curiosity about a life he cannot tolerate. Neither father nor daughter is villainized, the father having fulfilled his parental mandate in the best way he could, and the daughter helping her dad go to his freedom. Early in the film Tom finds a necklace of a metal sea horse, and reads about how the creatures attach for life. Tom’s final gesture in the film attests to her identification with this idea as she leaves a gift for her father and makes their clicking noise to evoke his presence.

Spring Film Festival Speakers:

Dennis Balcom, LICSW, is in private practice in Cambridge, teaches family therapy at the Boston University School of Social Work, and speaks and writes on men’s issues.