What is it about living in the woods?
Leave No Trace is the latest in a genre that has sprouted up in recent years like poison ivy. I've seen several films like it, and I've written about a few right here. It's rather fascinating to me that actors as diverse as Ellen Page and John Krasinski have all found themselves in woodland settings, living rough, and probably stinking to high heaven.
Some of these movies are interesting. They have a nice, green look, and though they all generally spell out the same shopworn anti-establishment theme, they're watchable. Leave No Trace is better than most.
If you haven't seen it, let's see if I can pull it out of the brush.
Will, a man in his late 30s, and his teen daughter have been living in the wild for a long time. He seems well-suited to the environment, and she follows his example, creating tasty meals out of mushrooms and listening to his advice on how to roam the woods undetected. You don't see many father-daughter combos working together so well in movies. But the authorities, who don't cotton to folks living on public property, eventually drag them back into society.
So Will and his daughter find themselves in a new environment. He gets a job harvesting Christmas trees; she befriends a local kid who takes care of rabbits. They go through the motions, and even attend a church service, but still sleep outside at night, lying under blankets in the front yard of their small ranch home.
The tensions of living without freedom start to get to the father, however. We see it on his face, as if the thought of having a roof over his head is like wearing a straitjacket.
The daughter seems more flexible. She likes hanging out with her new friends, learning to ride a bicycle, and petting rabbits at the 4-H club. She could get used to this new life.
You can see the rest of the story coming. He wants to get back into the wilderness and be free. She doesn't mind living indoors. Hell, it's nice to take a bath. They argue a bit, yet, she has an incredible fondness for her dad. Before you know it, they're back on the road, hitching rides with friendly truckers and getting as far from civilization as possible.
As predictable as some of this may sound, it works. Ben Foster is tremendous as the father, all grimaces and private angst. You really get a sense that society is like sandpaper on his skin. He doesn't say much, he does it all with his face and body language.
Every time someone is kind to him, Will looks on with suspicion and apprehension. We don't know exactly what made him this way, but he's obviously suffered some emotional trauma.
The rest of the story moves along smoothly, hypnotically. The only cliche is when the daughter finds her father's scrapbook, and notices a clipped newspaper article about ex marines struggling to adjust to civilian life. Why does a guy who doesn't even want a toilet feel the need to carry a scrapbook?
The ending, too, is a bit cute. The film was written and directed by women, and the message seems to be that women are caring nurturers and men are just sad idiots. Still, there's something about Leave No Trace that sticks to you like a burr on corduroy. It's hard to forget.
I especially liked the people we meet along the way. The truckers, the cops, the kindly folks who take the duo in at a trailer park, all seem down to Earth and just a tad melancholy. They aren't so different from us, the daughter explains at one point. That's why Foster seems doomed - everyone he meets is kind to him, yet he can't stand to look at them.
The daughter is played by Thomasin McKenzie. She's as good as Foster. If she never does anything else, she has this outstanding performance on her resume. As a teen girl plucked out of the woods and ushered into a world of snapchat and instagram and endless bureaucracy, she's marvelous. How did the casting agency ever find a girl totally void of modern day guile and self-consciousness?
I'm not sure what drives a person to create elaborate pranks. The reward of saying, "Ha! I gotcha!" seems small, almost childish. Sometimes, though, a good prank can border on a kind of performance art. Consider Joey Skaggs. During the 1970s and '80s he set up such infamous hoaxes as a brothel for dogs, or the time he posed as a scientist who had discovered a cure-all drug by experimenting with cockroaches. Broadcast news outlets, Entertainment Tonight, the New York Times, Geraldo Rivera, even Il Giornale, a conservative newspaper from Milan, fell for his every word. You'd think they might fact check when a guy advises you to inject roach enzymes into your bloodstream, but I guess not.
Art of the Prank, a likable, surprisingly watchable documentary from director Andrea Marini tells the story of Skaggs, a rascal who likes to trick the news media the way three-card Monte dealers rip off tourists. It is the sort of movie you watch and shake your head in disbelief, as time after time, Skaggs merrily bamboozles the press. And in Skaggs' hands, his pranks do come close to being art. He puts more thought into his hoaxes than the average indy filmmaker puts into a movie, which is why he succeeds.
At first the movie seems to be about Skaggs in retirement, since he long ago left the New York area for Hawaii and seems content. Yet, there's always one more idea percolating inside his mischievous brain; we learn that his pranking days are far from over.
Art of the Prank doesn't try to explain Skaggs, or serve as a biography. It's as if Skaggs had no childhood; he just seemed to
appear in the 1970s, with a band of loyal sidekicks willing to
participate in his brand of guerilla theater. If Skaggs had a message, it was that the media is made up of morons who would rather jump on a ridiculous story than take a moment to check its voracity. Members of the media who were stung by Skaggs appear in the film and are almost reverential about him. They seem honored to have fallen for his crap.
His latest prank, which involves a fake documentary about stem cell research, is astounding. In it, he plays a man who has lost his teeth, but submits to having shark cells injected into his jaw. He grows a new set of choppers - in real life Skaggs had a dentist create what look like shark teeth fitted for a human mouth - and lurks around the movie, a weird monstrosity that might, or might not, represent the future of stem cell tampering.
The rest of Art of the Prank involves Skaggs and his team trying to submit the stem cell documentary to film festivals. For a while it doesn't seem like Skaggs' latest prank will be accepted anywhere. It appears, albeit momentarily, that his best days of pranking may be behind him. Still, the prank film (cunningly titled Pandora's Hope,) eventually gets accepted to a few festivals, and then a few more. Skaggs has fun at the events,
showing up with his fake shark teeth, playing the role of a stem cell
advocate named Joe Howard. He sits in a dark corner of a cinema, watching the audience watch him on the screen. Some laugh at his shark-toothed smile. Some are repulsed.
As much as I liked the movie, I still wish we got to know a little more about Skaggs. A bit of rudimentary research informs us that he makes his living these days as a painter and lecturer, and also as a production assistant on a television program called Top Chef Jr. Pranking doesn't pay much, and Skaggs still has to make a buck. Would Art of the Prank be better if were learned more about Skaggs' personal life? Maybe not. And now I'm wondering if his work on Top Chef Jr is just part of another prank.
Skaggs, who is now in his 70s, came of age during the glory days of the counter culture. At times he reminded me of Robert Crumb, and also Andy Kaufman. I wonder why I'd never heard of him until now. He's certainly my kind of guy. Most touching of all, though, is the loyalty shown by his old cronies. One after another chimes in during the film, saying they'll do anything
for Skaggs. All he has to do is call and they'll
drop what they're doing, so intense is the relationship between Skaggs
and his team. One of the women from his gang is interviewed now. Stately-looking and grey-haired, she reminisces about the days when Skaggs skewered the media on an almost yearly basis. She took part in a 1976 hoax about a
celebrity sperm bank set up in Manhattan. In that one she played a hippie chick
waiting for a sample of Bob Dylan's sperm. Those were the days, eh? Unfortunately, Art of the Prank was made just before the election of Donald Trump and the era of "fake news." What would Skaggs do in such a climate? And is he already doing it?
