“As Tom, the daughter of a PTSD-afflicted war veteran (Ben Foster) who has taken himself and the young girl off the grid, making for them a quiet, if illegal, existence living off the land in a forested park within Portland, Oregon city limits, 18-year-old New Zealand native Thomasin Harcourt Mackenzie is a relatively new presence to moviegoers. And in Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace there’s an openness and vulnerability to her performance, to her very appearance, that suggests someone an audience can chance upon from the ground up, a personality, a human being in the process of being shaped, defined, of learning the real value of curiosity, of expression. (Mackenzie’s highest profile appearance prior to this film was in a small role in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies in 2014.) But there’s also a bristling, pointedly interior intelligence at work in Mackenzie which serves the struggle of her character to bring that curiosity and expression to the surface.
“Once they’ve been temporarily reined in by social service agents and given a taste of being reintegrated back into society, the father bristles, but Tom realizes that, though she wants nothing more than to be with her dad, a modest life among modest people carries its own allures. It’s this personal journey that is illuminated so eloquently by Mackenzie’s modest, naturalistic approach to the role. She marks the territory of her character’s development in hushed strokes, her wide eyes processing not only the details of the wooded environment which gives her and her father cover from the whole of the world, but also every element of the world she’s been largely separated from as she begins the incremental process of being integrated into it. What’s genuinely marvelous about Mackenzie’s work, in close collaboration with a director who most definitely shares her sensibility, is the way she makes clear the dawning difference between parent and child without signaling or overemphasizing the metaphoric significance. Mackenzie’s Tom eases into a world of new experiences with a child’s natural curiosity—sea horses she reads about in books, flag dancers at a local church, 4-H kids raising rabbits, learning about the temperament and tendencies of hive bees—while her dad remains at a measured distance, his mind never far away from the clarion call of an isolated existence to which he longs to return.
“Mackenzie’s considerable achievement here is to navigate viewers, with invisible technique and a depth of empathy that would be the hallmark of any far more seasoned actress, into an understanding of experience as this emerging young woman understands it, an understanding whose source can be traced directly to Mackenzie’s countenance and the way she occupies space, both in the frame and in her ever-new environment. By the time Tom declares to her father that ‘the same thing that’s wrong with you isn’t wrong with me,’ the movie has fulfilled its unhurried journey toward sublimity, with myriad opportunities for its audience to appreciate the nuanced, rarified air of a soul discovering itself, asserting independence, breathing in the world. The beauty of Mackenzie’s performance is how it matches that sublimity in unostentatious, yet vivid detail, there to be observed, certainly, but also camouflaged by a fresh, unassuming presence that serves both Tom and Thomasin supremely well.” ~ Dennis Cozzalio
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