Nonton Film Leave No Trace (2018) Full Movie
Nonton Film Leave No Trace (2018) Full Movie Sub Indonesia
Debra Granik’s new movie, “Leave No Trace,” does many things at once, some blatantly and some subtly, some simplistically and some deeply. It’s an often unsatisfying, frustrating, and narrow movie, yet it opens out, at times, to profoundly moving vistas that stretch far beyond the immediate scope of the drama. It’s the story of a thirteen-year-old girl named Tom (Thomasin McKenzie) and her father, Will (Ben Foster), who, at his insistence, live off the grid, in a camp that he’s set up in a heavily wooded part of a park on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon.
There’s a hint that Will’s wife, Tom’s mother, is dead; there’s something in his past that he’s hiding, and Tom knows that he’s hiding something (it’s not clear whether she knows what it is), but the movie offers no specifics about either story. Will raises Tom to evade capture; they change the location of their camp from time to time (it’s unclear how long they’ve been in the woods), and he puts her through drills to make her aware of the traces that she leaves.
They encounter other park dwellers, all of whom live in fear of the authorities. Will and Tom head into town together on foot to buy supplies—and to get pills from a V.A. hospital, which, back in the park, he promptly sells to other park-dwellers who need them and can’t get them.
But, soon thereafter, the barking of dogs signals that they’re about to be caught by park rangers—their crime is living on public land, and, while Will is taken away in handcuffs, Tom is brought back to the camp by officers who get her to show them how she and Will lived. Granik dramatizes their detainment with a keen sense of detail, first showing Tom in a holding center with two other girls of about her own age, who inform her that “parents never come back.” A compassionate social worker named Jean (Dana Millican) gives Tom academic and psychological tests and determines that Will has schooled her well—but asserts that she needs the social education of the company of other children, in school. For Tom’s part, he, too, is subjected to a battery of tests—psychological tests, through which he’s coached by another social worker who has his interests at heart. Will isn’t put under arrest, isn’t put in a facility, avoids losing custody of Tom, and, instead of bearing the brunt of the law, is the beneficiary of yet another good turn: a farmer named Walters (Jeff Kober) sees their story on TV and offers them the use of a small, pleasant house on his large spread of property in exchange for Will’s work readying trees for Christmas season.
Tom enjoys living in the house; she encounters neighbors near the farm and has the start of a social life. But Will’s secretiveness has a strongly paranoid and compulsive side, as well as a Luddite austerity. When Jean brings extra furnishings, he refuses them; he rejects cell phones; he puts the house’s TV into the closet. Will reminds Tom, when they move in, “We can still think our own thoughts”—as if he were worried that, upon contact with media and society, they could no longer do so. But the movie’s not very clear on what his thoughts are; Will does a minimum of talking. He brings Tom to a service at a local church because Will cynically wants to create a favorable impression in order to avoid questions about his background. (For her part, Tom is happy to go, and enjoys making acquaintances there.) His intended self-isolation is nearly complete (though the movie fudges his unavoidable social contacts—he spends his days working on the tree farm with Walters’s other employees, scenes shown merely impressionistically, with no attention to their interactions.) Then, when it’s time for Will to fill out the paperwork that will allow her to attend the local school, Will instead pulls out, with Tom, and, by a series of ruses and byways, takes her into the deep country to live out of sight again.
There, too, Will is the beneficiary of exceptional generosity. Keeping spoilers out, he and Tom are taken care of again by extraordinarily welcoming people. In effect, the story of “Leave No Trace” is: white people keep giving a white man houses. It’s a story of privilege, of sorts—but of bitterly earned privilege that arises, in significant measure, from his status as a military veteran.
Granik advances the action, step-wise, as if each scene illustrated a sentence in a story, but she doesn’t display much of an observational sense, or much of an interest in seeing the characters do anything idle, expressive, contemplative, or introspective—she has little concern for their thoughts or states of mind. She offers no clarity regarding what Will and Tom know about his life story that makes him absolutely unwilling to share it at all with anyone, whether social workers, school authorities, or neighbors. (Keeping his story out of the movie flattens both the characters and the drama.) The protagonists speak mostly to push forward the plot. In this way, Granik—as she did in “Winter’s Bone”—yields to one of the weakest clichés of movies about poor people, farmers, or manual laborers: silence, or, more specifically, the assumption that people short on money or education are also short of speech and have little to say.
Yet there is an overarching design to “Leave No Trace” that’s both furiously moving and vastly resonant. Though Tom is the movie’s main character, it adopts her point of view in order to observe Will, from the outside, with rueful empathy. In depicting Will’s drama, along with that of another veteran character, who turns up late in the film and whose battlefield skills prove crucial to the drama, Granik is pursuing—allusively, furiously, empathetically—the ideas that Clint Eastwood dramatized in “American Sniper”: the emotional ruins left after America’s unending post-9/11 wars, as a result of the squandering, by misguided politicians, of the virtues, the bodies, the minds, and the lives of the uniquely dedicated soldiers who volunteered to serve in them.
Granik is doing nothing less than pointing at the present-day American self-inflicted political catastrophe and asserting that it’s a direct and inevitable result of American military adventurism, cavalier disregard for those who volunteered for service, and the inability to reintegrate mentally wounded veterans into society—or to reconcile them with the society that destroyed their peace of mind, shattered their identities, and offers them pills (or none). The drama of “Leave No Trace” is diffuse and vague, but its lack of specificity opens the door to the powerful abstraction of a central and decisive idea. Granik’s film suggests that, largely out of view, the country is buried in soul-wreckage that results directly from its two decades of bad wars. Without any overt expressions of ideology or political discussion, of resentments or hatreds, she shows the ravaged ground in which poisonous politics grow.
“Leave No Trace” isn’t a comprehensive or panoramic, wide-ranging or representative view of American doctrine or of the plight of veterans; it focusses on a very small segment of the population and, for that matter, of military families. Its vision goes beyond its characters’ immediate experience to evoke an alienation, a disgust that goes further and deeper, a sense that deeply devoted people were willing to fight and die for institutions that, they soon came to believe, were corrupt and abusive, that exploited their commitment and slighted their sacrifices. It’s a story of disconnection, of explicit or implicitly disconnecting from society at large, in the interest of an unspoken internal exile—one that Will experiences as a sort of desperate flight, as a fugitive not only from society but from himself, which Granik inscribes into the American landscape at large.