Leave No Trace

A nice little film about a veteran who feels compelled to ramble on, and his daughter who loves the different kind of life and different kind of paternal bond that makes possible…up to a point (the point of adolescence, one supposes, although the film mostly leaves that issue unspoken, or just hinted at, which is a probably a good thing). The filmmakers aim to convey the relationship in a more restrained and subtle way than is common for this kind of parental drama, and also succeed in presenting an ambivalent picture of social service institutions, psychological evaluations and so on, while also making clear that the United States is a society highly prone to heavy-handed forms of enforcement (partly the flip side of its unusually strong fetish for “freedom”, partly a consequence of having become saturated with firearms, where these two factors are themselves obviously interrelated and mutually reinforcing). The conclusion is ambiguous, no doubt intentionally, but the way it stages the difference between the first, compromised housing situation they are put into, and the second, more “communal” arrangement that they discover for themselves, in part serves to mask the fact that the very same questions will arise there too (will she go to school? how will that work out? how will she take care of her subsistence? what down sides will she face in “integrating” socially and economically? and so on).