Leave No Trace - Home

*Spoilers ahead for Leave No Trace*

I’ve never been much of a sharer. I’m typically a private person, rarely hinting at any sorts of struggles or emotions. I suppose then that the intention for this blog has been, at least in part, to correct that. Of course, sharing my own personal experiences is a hell of a lot easier when it is filtered through discussions of film and television. Nonetheless, it is in this spirit that I am so grateful to have welcomed Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace into my life.

The film is a visual feast. Seriously, you could watch this film on silent and still be awestruck by the beauty it finds in spiderwebs, evergreens, and even bees.

But this film is ultimately anchored by the father-daughter relationship at its core. Will (Ben Foster) and his daughter Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie) are forced out of their isolated life in an Oregon public park by local authorities, leading to a desperate journey for a place to call home. Will could easily force us to continue my previous post’s discussion on fatherhood, as he just might be 2018’s most fascinatingly complicated father yet. But Will and Tom’s nomadic adventure highlights another concept that has been of interest to me lately: home. What does it mean to be home? Where is home? Is it a place at all?

Well, in Leave No Trace Tom explicitly says that home is wherever her dad is. But why then does the film end with Will going off on his own, leaving Tom behind at a trailer park, where she finally seems to be happy and, most importantly, at home?

Home in Leave No Trace is identified most simply as a choice. You are home when you have the agency to identify a place as such. Tom and Will call their small campsite in an Oregon nature reserve home because they have been able to render it so. They resist adaptation to a new life in an actual house, not because they feel an intense attachment to their previous home, but because this one is just assigned to them. They had no power in selecting this life, and for Will in particular, this feels like a surrendering of his rights.

Much of Will’s mindset is tied up in PTSD stemming from his military service in the Middle East, and I hope writers more knowledgeable on that subject can offer relevant insight on how Will’s perspective on home comes about. Still, it is safe to say that Will and Tom must separate at the end of the film to accommodate their differing ideas of a home. As Tom tells her dad, “the same thing that’s wrong with you isn’t wrong with me.” Her words are harsh as a result of pent up frustration, but they also highlight a difficult truth for the daughter and her father to realize, which proves their eventual split to be all too necessary. Of course, even with this understanding, the ending isn’t any less upsetting for viewers. This split between father and daughter is emotional; the entire audience in the theater I was in simply sat and stared well into the credits roll.

In some ways, this split reminds me of my parents dropping me off at college two years ago. I was abandoning my home, or at least my eighteen-year-long understanding of what a home is supposed to be. Of course, separating from my family was less difficult than the separation between Tom and Will. Technology allows me to blur the line between my new home in Pittsburgh and my home on the other side of the state. Will refuses to get a cell phone, hoping to leave himself off the grid entirely. His separation from Tom could potentially prevent them from ever crossing paths again.

I am grateful to have homes in multiple locations, but life as a college student can sometimes strip you of any sense of home at all. If lessons from Leave No Trace are any indication, shouldn’t Pittsburgh be my home? It is, after all, a place I chose to live and study. But as long as I am moving between different homes, I can often feel like Tom does throughout much of Leave No Trace. Home inevitably becomes part of your identity, so having multiple homes can feel like a dissipation of identity altogether. Most importantly, we should take pride in our homes, but how do you take pride in that which is not truly yours?

The relationship between pride and home extends to our national and global identities as well. America is also, on some level, my home. But it can often be difficult to take pride in an American identity, particularly in today’s challenging, and quite frankly embarrassing, times. I recently had the opportunity to attend the Hesselbein Global Leadership Academy, and meet like-minded students from all over the world. These remain some of the most impressive people I have ever met, and my interactions with them stand out as some of the most formative experiences of my college career. I’ll admit I entered the weekend with an unhealthy blend of skepticism and apathy, but I was completely blown away by just how special my peers were. What united so many of them was a love for where they came from, their homes. Many of them spoke of their desires to better their countries and correct the difficulties facing their respective communities. This wasn’t some sort of blind patriotism; this was a genuine love and passion for one’s home, a passion that embraces the strengths of these homes, and addresses the weaknesses.

And so these experiences, cinematic and otherwise, have reshaped my idea of what a home can be. Home is a choice, but perhaps it is also an obligation. Will and Tom realize, despite their close bond, home looks different for each of them. And my peers at Hesselbein realize home is dynamic, able to molded, altered, bettered. And it is our responsibility to, once we find our home, work to make that place what we think it can be.

Will’s outlook on home is partly steeped in his attitude towards his country, and that’s OK. My idea of home is similarly shaped by my division of time between two different ones. Perhaps one of these locations will emerge as my true home, or perhaps I will end up somewhere else entirely. But we owe it to ourselves to find that which we can call home, and to help that home evolve into something we can be truly proud of. Will’s unique circumstances make it difficult to know if he would ever heed such advice, but I am nonetheless grateful for Leave No Trace’s complicated approach to the idea of home, and aiding in my own struggles with this idea accordingly.

Until next time,

Cory Reid