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Thursday, July 25, 2019

Leave No Trace (2018)

This is a pretty painful film to watch.  Ben Foster, a rising star as an actor, plays a combat veteran who is living in the woods on public land with his daughter.  It is unclear what it was like before his wife died, but he was just very ill equipped to raise her in a traditional way, despite loving her deeply.  The two of them manage to cope quite well, in that the father is teaching his daughter and they are most definitely homeless.  The relationship between them is companionable, and the daughter feels safe and cared for.
Then they get hunted down by police and after much ado, they are housed in a pretty rural setting, and while the daughter seems to blossom a bit, the father is clearly very stressed and not managing.  So they are on the road again.
The end of the movie is not what you would hope for, but probably much closer to the truth about the struggle that combat veterans have with PTSD and being closed in.

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