First up was Leave No Trace at the Brattle, with producer Linda Reisman, writer/director Debra Granik, and WBUR's Erin Trahan moderating. Granik has been someone friends and I have been known to use as a frustrated example when talking about how opportunities for men and women are not exactly fairly distributed - this comes eight years after Winter's Bone, which launched Jennifer Lawrence's career and saw Granik nominated for an Oscar, and you can sure find a lot of examples of men getting a chance at bigger productions without having anything that successful. She didn't talk much about that - what's to say, really, that anybody in the audience for this film doesn't already know? - and maybe she's not particularly interested in making that sort of movie. She does this type so well, after all.
She and Reisman talked a lot about how they put this one together, praising the location scout in particular for finding them a lot of great spots to shoot. There were also some entertaining stories about how Thomasin McKenzie was fantastic but working with a young actor from New Zealand on this sort of film could be kind of challenging - you have to audition from the other side of the planet, and having her call to talk about her research and practice her American accent. They also mentioned that the screenplay wound up having a few major changes from the original novel (My Abandonment by Peter Rock). It's an interesting set of seemingly opposite impulses, casting a wide net to find McKenzie and clearly having a strong structure, but also building around the locations and pulling a lot of people they met there into the cast.
It was a good Q&A, and went on just long enough that I was seated at the Somerville just as Rodents of Unusual Size was starting and thus wound up in the front row staring straight up at those R.O.U.S.es projected way bigger than life.
Quinn Costello, one of the film's three directors, came to talk about his film, with Jackie from the festival handling the host duties. Costello served as the film's editor and talked about how, once they'd hatched the idea of the film, he and the other two directors sort of tag-teamed while they were on the ground, as they were not necessarily all there at the same time.
It was a fun movie which sometimes led to fun questions, including whether they had eaten any nutria (whether from first or second hand experience, he gave the impression that it was not better than steak like some of their subjects claimed). Asked about the title, he said that the filmmakers weren't looking to go for the Princess Bride reference - it's not used in the film at all - but that pretty much every zoologist or other scientist they talked to went to the that unbidden, so they might as well use it so long as MGM wouldn't charge them an arm and a leg.
Leave No Trace
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
It's been far too long since Debra Granik's previous feature, Winter's Bone, although it's important not to ignore Stray Dog, the documentary she made a few years ago, which followed a group of veteran bikers, as likely being a major influence on this long-awaited follow-up. Its details echo in this very different story, although not so blatantly that what she and her cast do here ever feels like mere transcription - it's a terrific little film that makes one hope the industry will give her what she needs to make its like more often.
This one opens in a state park in the Pacific Northwest, where widower Will (Ben Foster) and his daughter of about fourteen, Tom (Thomasin McKenzie), are camped out and have been for some time. Both are intelligent and resourceful, and occasionally go into town to convert the benefits and medication Will gets at the VA into resources, and regularly drill concealing their camp so that they will not be discovered. It can't last forever, of course, but when they are found, the social workers make great effort to minimize the difficulty adjusting - a fellow veteran (Jeff Kober) not only offers Will a job, but a guest house where he and Tom can live without being overwhelmed. It may still be too much for him.
The time Granik spent with the bikers of Stray Dog likely gives her a better-than-average handle on the details of Will's PTSD, especially in terms of what helps and how much; people who have seen the previous movie will have two smiles on their face when a few small dogs show up as the film goes on. She and co-writer Anne Rosellini leave enough details laying around that a general picture can emerge but avoid moments where one person ever tells another what happened or what to do. Will's state of mind isn't going to be patched by reverse-engineering the origins of his trauma, and there's not some solution that applies to those afflicted generally. Granik builds a story that highlights how internal Will's guilt, shame, and fear is while still finding ways to keep things somewhat active.
Full review on EFC
Rodents of Unusual Size
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2018 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
I went on vacation to New Orleans just a couple months before seeing this movie, and while I would not have made other plans if that sequencing was reversed, just seeing its poster or even an image or two of nutrias might have given me pause, especially when I got to the part about how members of this 20-pound species can make their way up sewer pipes and into toilets. But that's also a big part of the appeal of this documentary: Discovering that there are peculiar and fascinating things not far out of plain sight.
In this case, that's the nutria, a rodent with a rat-like tail on one end and orange tusks on the other, imported from Argentina around a hundred years ago to be raised for their pelts. They got loose during a flood and spread throughout the bayou, trapped by Cajuns until the 1980s, when the bottom fell out of the fur market. No longer hunted by humans and not having any natural predators (they breed faster than alligators can eat them, especially in the winter), their population exploded, and as invasive species tend to do, they had a devastating effect not just on the local wildlife but on the very bayou itself, to the point where the state of Louisiana has offered a bounty of five dollars for every nutria tail brought in.
That paragraph could serve as the entry on nutria in a textbook that has a lot of material to cover and it's fair to wonder how one gets an entire film out of it, but Rodents of Unusual Size becomes a nifty little documentary because it's about something that initially seems small and singular but which actually touches upon much larger things. Filmmakers Quinn Costello, Chris Metzler, and Jeff Springer started from a simple starting point - these unusual animals and the people who trap them - but they are quickly able to expand the subjects covered to the idea of invasive species and how human and environmental systems interact. It is, aside from being a fine primer on its own topic, also just a good introduction to understanding just how far-reaching consequences can be.
Full review on EFC
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