The frustrated descendants of the American western

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.