There’s nowhere to run to in American films any more. The wide open spaces grow narrower by the day. The once impenetrable forests have been carved up for logging, while the prairies are lost to soybean crops and stripmalls. As for the mountains, forget it – the hiking trails in the summer are as busy as Grand Central Station. The lone explorer nods an awkward hello to all the other lone explorers and pitches his tent every night in designated campsites. The US is no longer a home where the buffalo roam. And if there’s nowhere to run, it means there’s nowhere to hide.
Good One, the fine first feature from writer-director India Donaldson, paints an exacting portrait of America’s 21st-century wilderness problem as it shadows a trio of hikers on a weekend jaunt through the Catskills. Donaldson’s film is full of moss and mountains, lakes and stars. But it also contains cars and tourists and phones that trill with incoming messages each time their owners climb a hill and get a signal. Newcomer Lily Collias plays teenage Sam, who comes to regret accompanying her amiable dad (James Le Gros) and his best mate Matt (Danny McCarthy) to the woods. Dad, we learn, has just weaselled out of a stressful work project, while Matt is in full, ignominious flight from his marriage. At night, by the tent, the men entertain themselves with campfire horror stories about ruinous divorces and reckless adulteries. Judging by the look on Sam’s face, the girl can’t wait to get back to her Brooklyn brownstone.
If wilderness tourism is a growth industry, it follows that films on the subject should be booming as well. Sure enough, Donaldson’s drama joins a burgeoning sub-genre of pictures in which people pack their insect repellent, lace up their boots and prepare to light out for the territories with varying degrees of success (also, it must be said, varying degrees of desperation). It’s trudging in the footsteps of Jean-Marc Vallee’s Wild (2014), which sent intrepid Reese Witherspoon up the Pacific Crest Trail, and Kelly Reichardt’s sublime Old Joy (2006), in which Will Oldham and Daniel London embark on a lugubrious trek to a restorative hot spring in the woods. Somewhere up ahead, surely, lies the wreckage of Sean Penn’s grand, fact-based Into the Wild (2007), which memorably came to rest inside a derelict bus in the Alaskan wilds. Alaska – low on people, high on bears – is a magnet for the heroes of these films. It’s where the dad in Good One plans to go next year, once he has conquered the Catskills. It’s where Jack Nicholson runs to at the end of Five Easy Pieces (1970).
Probably these films hail from an altogether older tradition, too, in that they’re the frustrated descendants of the Hollywood western. Those classic John Ford and Howard Hawks movies were fictions at best and outright lies at worst, but they came out of an era in which the frontier had only recently closed and it was still possible to imagine a country that was wild and open and ripe for the taking. In casting the American cowboy as a glamorous lone wolf, films such as Stagecoach (1939) and Red River (1948) provided a convenient cover story for all the pretenders who follow and want to view their own lives through rose-tinted glasses. This explains why the itinerant van-dwellers in Chloe Zhao’s Oscar-winning Nomadland (2020) are so keen to present themselves as rugged wild west heroes, out riding the plains and living free, even when the reality of their adventure rarely extends beyond the RV park and the Amazon warehouse. It’s what allows the city slickers in Good One to play-act the roles of rambling Lewis and Clark, at least until Monday when they are due back at work.
One of the best examples of this new breed of thwarted, arrested cowboy tale is Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace (2018), a sharp-eyed, heart-piercing account of a father and daughter who have elected to live off-grid in Forest Park, a stretch of woodland just outside Portland, Oregon. Granik’s film lifts its title from the National Parks Service guidelines, which instructs hikers and campers to cover their tracks and pick up their litter.
“Whatever you take in, you take out,” they are told. That could be the motto of every great drama about flawed modern heroes who venture into the great outdoors. The father in Leave No Trace, it turns out, is a military veteran suffering from PTSD. Nomadland’s peripatetic outcasts are in financial dire straits. These people might still believe in the myth of America: the idea you can pack up and ship out and reinvent yourself somewhere else. But in practice they found that this doesn’t work. The wilderness has all been claimed and tamed, and Mother Nature can’t cure them, which means that they’re stuck with the problems they were trying to outpace. The old western cowboys at least rode towards something. Their descendants, by contrast, are usually running away.
If a hike through the Catskills is an escapist pursuit, then Good One might count as an escapist motion picture. Donaldson’s film certainly leans into the beauty of the mountains and occasionally loses itself to the call of the wild. It’s a quiet, unhurried, immersive piece of work, a hand-tooled indie drama that plays out to the crackle of campfires and the whisper of the wind in the grass. But it’s about the futility of escape, not the sugar rush of freedom, and it’s this tough core of unsentimentality that lifts the film past the level of tasteful nature-porn and plants it in at least the foothills of greatness. Hanging back on the trail, Sam watches her dad and his buddy struggle under the weight of their rucksacks. They carry them in and they carry them out. They’re sweating and complaining; they’re not having much fun. If anything, they say, the bags feel much heavier on the return leg of their trip.
‘Good One’ is out in UK cinemas from 16 May
