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Showing posts from August, 2018

Leave No Trace

It's significant that  one of the most moving bits of communication between daughter and father in Debra Granik's Leave No Trace is not an exchange of words.  It an occasional clicking sound, an affirmation between the child and parent.  It's a tolling of animal sympathy and understanding.  A simple, eloquent expression of love beyond speech.   Delivering her third memorable feature film, Debra Granik wrote the script with her long-time creative partner Anne Rosellini.  Their collaboration in the case Leave No Trace is a masterwork of understatement, if not blatant minimalism.  Both father Will (Ben Foster) and Tom (Thomasin McKenzie), whom we first meet living secretly amid the lush vegetation of forested public lands somewhere outside of Portland, Oregon, tend toward the laconic in speech.  Granik and Rossellini, like their characters, speak mainly when they have something important to say. From this source, this minimal script like telling ripples on deep