Produced by the Oscar winning duo of Ron Howard and Brian Grazer and directed by Oscar nominated director Irene Taylor, Leave No Trace is a prestige documentary released on the Hulu platform that takes a blowtorch to the once highly regarded Boy Scouts of America institution as it grapples with a 2.7 billion dollar lawsuit relating to tens of thousands of abuse claims by former scouts who experienced life changing traumatic incidents that took place when they were on official scout sanctioned activities/activation's.
Once a beacon of American boyhood/manhood and a rite of passage for millions upon millions of children across the world, Taylor and her team that includes some brave real life subjects that offer up a raw, honest and confronting insight into what type of evil deeds have transpired under the not so watchful eye of the scouts brand, have with Leave No Trace delivered a damning and undeniable death knell of the Boy Scouts of America who one would wonder how they could ever recover from their far too long mismanagement of diabolical issues.
Arguably not digging deep enough into both the history of the scouts initial roots and into those that have allowed almost 100 years of mismanagement to take place while also taking some curious detours into such angles as Norman Rockwell's artistic work for the scouts, Leave No Trace isn't always as focused or layered as one might've hoped for on such a loaded and incendiary topic but when Taylor allows victims of heinous acts the time to tell their story and not shy away from the horrors of such honest experiences, her film is as powerful as you're likely to see from any film this year.
Listening to grown men try and put into words the way in which their lives have been shaken to the core by incidents they experienced as innocent and unwillingly minors is heartbreaking yet necessary for the full picture of the crimes of the scouts to became apparent and for giving a small but worthy array of subjects a platform to educate the world on the topic, Taylor and her team should be commended with Leave No Trace becoming an important vehicle for the world to understand the true magnitude of this well-known issue that should never have been allowed to grow to the level it did.
Final Say -
Not always staying on track, Leave No Trace takes a few missteps but offers up an honest and confronting examination of the Boy Scouts of America crimes while giving some of the organisations victims a chance to finally be heard in a world that ignored them for far too long.
3 1/2 Zoom calls out of 5.
Jordan and Eddie (The Movie Guys)
