5 hours ago
6
Road movie and coming-of-age are accepted genres; maybe hiking-through-the-forest deserves equal status. It’s a distinctive US indie type, coloured by the sun-dappled green foliage, flavoured by the unemphatic presence of both beauty and danger. And heading for … what? An escalating series of scary moments, or just a low-key crescendo of epiphanies or emotional confrontations? Middle-class New Yorkers can journey through the wilderness in the movies but, unlike in John Boorman’s 1972 film Deliverance, they may encounter only the inner hillbillies of their own anxiety and discontent.
This excellent film from first-time director India Donaldson is a smart, sympathetic and terrifically acted drama about 17-year-old Sam – an outstanding performance from Lily Collias – who agrees to go on a hiking trip in the Catskill mountains with her gloomy divorced dad Chris (played by James Le Gros) and his buddy Matt (Danny McCarthy), a failed actor who shares his friend’s marital status (divorced), his portly body type, his receding hairline and his habit of exhaustedly cracking wise about the awful way their lives appear to have worked out.
This trip was supposed to have included Matt’s stroppy teen son Dylan (company for Sam, presumably) but he has pulled out after a quarrel with Matt – so now, a little weirdly, it’s just the two ageing guys and the teenage girl in what promises to be a non-bonding adventure before Sam heads off to college, a kind of platonic Jules-et-Jim or Butch-and-Sundance and Katharine Ross dynamic, only it’s just a vacation.
Or is it? Donaldson sets a low-key tone of banter and backtalk, in which Sam has to ride in the back of her Subaru, making herself carsick by checking her phone and annoying her dad by asking if she can drive; he finds it annoying because she is actually a better driver than he is. Goofy Matt shows himself to as incompetent at hiking as he is at managing the rest of his life, and as they chat by the campfire under the stars, Matt is quietly awed by the wise, insightful way Sam sums up his problems and predicts how the rest of his life could well go. It’s a lovely moment – and then the mood goes terribly wrong.
Another kind of director might have cranked the dial way up at this crisis in her relationship with both Matt and Chris but Donaldson decides to let it go, just as Sam effectively lets it go and the mood recedes calmly back to normality. It is subtly climactic, as if in a short story, and you can see how Sam, as she gets into her 20s and 30s, is going to look back on this as a strange last-moment-of-youth event. (I almost wondered if we were going to get a flash-forward of older Sam looking back on it.)
In some ways, the father-daughter theme reminded me of Debra Granik’s 2018 Leave No Trace, and I wonder if Donaldson has taken a little inspiration from that film. It is very intelligent and humane, and what a great performance from Collias.
