In ‘Captain Fantastic’ (2016), director Matt Ross constructs a self-consciously egalitarian haven ‘out of Plato’s republic’. The film’s opening sequence presents us with girls who skin animals and build shrines to Pol Pot; men who nurture both plants and small children. In this forest commune, it seems, inequalities of age and gender are swept aside – or at least kept safely at bay in the outside world of ‘undereducated and overmedicated’ mainstream America. Yet despite appearances, this is a society clearly presided over by adult male power (embodied in Viggo Mortensen’s Ben Cash); the counterpoint female presence of Leslie Cash (Trin Miller) is not only notable for but defined by her absence.  Obviously this is key to the subtext of Ross’s narrative – without Leslie’s stabilising influence the family descends into chaos; it is only when they are finally reunited with her (or her body at least) that peace and equilibrium are restored. However Ross’s erasure of Leslie as a physically present, three-dimensional character opens up a wider debate about the film’s representation of female agency and identity.

    From the very beginning of the film, Leslie’s identity is constructed through a series of objects, distanced from the rest of the family. Ben and the children’s initial introduction is established in terms of the forest and of violence, with the mud camouflage and the framing of them emerging from the undergrowth bringing to mind both the child savages of Lord of the Flies, and the dangerous charisma of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. However these sinister undertones are soon juxtaposed by the warm aesthetic of the montage sequence that introduces their forest home, in which many of the frames imply Leslie’s maternal influence. Cutaway shots that linger on glass jars of jewel-like preserves and the vintage sewing machine are lit in almost rose-tinted tones, with the ascending major key score emphasising the sense of wonder that these rustically idyllic scenes create. Leslie’s connection to these details is highlighted by Ross’s intercutting of brief glimpses of her, such as the framed wedding photo showing her and Ben smiling in a canoe, her flowing white dress hinting at a more traditional attitude than Ben’s bright red suit. Indeed, regardless of the apparent gender equality in the family, Leslie is constructed here as a modern angel of the hearth: a wife and mother (of six children, no less), inextricably associated with the home. While Ben and the forest are dark, mysterious, perhaps even dangerous, Leslie’s domestic domain is warm, safe and nurturing, suggesting an underlying conservatism in Ross’s attitudes to gender roles that belies the preferred reading of idyllic egalitarianism. Significantly, there are no photos or personal objects that suggest an individual identity beyond marriage and motherhood; in her physical absence, Ross’s framing of Leslie reduces her to a silent Wendy Darling to the Cash family’s Lost Boys.

     Of course, this is a film about absence, about loss, but significantly it is also about the characters’ struggles to understand who Leslie really was. Ross constantly presents us with different fractured and conflicting versions, reflective of Leslie’s multifaceted identities – wife, mother, daughter, teacher, intellectual. Practically every character in the film talks about ‘who’ Leslie was – what she thought, what she wanted, what she valued. The closest we come to seeing Leslie for ourselves is in Ben’s visions of her, both taking place as he awakes, hovering between dreaming and consciousness. In these sequences Ross promotes a heightened sense of intimacy using soft focus close ups; Leslie looks straight into the camera – into our eyes but also into Ben’s. In the second of these (which takes place the night before the funeral as Ben lies in his bunk on Steve the bus) she laughs jubilantly, leans in to embrace him, her red hair draping over the camera in Ben’s point of view, and then Ross cuts to a shot over her shoulder, showing Ben’s smiling face covered with her hair.  ‘Are you happy?’ he asks; ‘yeah,’ she responds, ‘I’m here with you’. It’s a sequence calculated to immerse us in the private world of their relationship, to give us a glimpse of the partnership that underpins Ben’s certainty in actions that can seem unfathomable and ill-judged. In this respect, the dream sequences could be seen to function similarly to Shakespearean soliloquy, offering insight into Ben’s motivations. Yet this in itself is problematic – these scenes appear to show us the ‘real’ Leslie, but even here she is only partially revealed, as she moves in and out of the frame, fragmented, like our knowledge of her. Furthermore, these visions mainly serve to develop our understanding of Ben; as we literally see her through Ben’s eyes, Leslie becomes the embodiment of the male gaze, and therefore what we see is his biased version. Ben’s idea of his wife chimes almost completely with Ross’s construction of her in the opening montage – devoted to the family (here to Ben in particular) and fulfilled by this role. She assures him of how happy she is to be with him, ‘my fantastic man’. Ben conjures the version of Leslie that he needs to reassure him, and Ross’s immersion of us in Ben’s perspective makes it very tempting for us to passively believe it.

    However, Ross’s cinematography and non-diegetic score also make it clear that this construction is a fantasy; to trust it would be to ignore the discordant versions of Leslie evoked by other characters. Dave paints her as an aggressive, uncompromising moral warrior (‘I had given the kids some Frosted Mini Wheats, we got in an argument and the extremity of her position was…’), and even her own children show that Ben’s idealised version of her is very far from the whole truth. After the funeral, Rellian tells Bo about their mother’s terrifying visions of violently killing the children, her awareness that she was not well and needed help (‘she wanted to leave’); in turn Bo throws down his college acceptance letters in front of Ben, countering his father’s disbelief and anger by revealing that Leslie was the driving force behind his escape route (‘I am a freak because of you… Mom knew that, she understood’). The uncompromising aesthetic of these scenes – the harsh low key lighting of the basketball court, the picnic bench floating as a dot of light in a sea of darkness – evokes the sense of this as the Cash family’s dark night of the soul. This visual coldness highlights the fact the family is finally facing up to very difficult home truths, diametrically opposed to the warm insularity of Ben’s comforting but one-sided visions. For the first time, the Cashes grapple directly with the conflicting emotions swirling beneath their happy facade, and Leslie’s complex identity serves as the touchstone.

    This confronting of reality is ushered in with the church funeral organised by Leslie’s parents Jack and Abigail; ironically, the only moment in the film that offers a glimpse of Leslie’s prior identity comes from the priest who, as Ben points out ‘didn’t even know her’. From him we learn that she was a lawyer who gave up her practice to raise the children, a decision which clearly Ross intends us to laud and admire, regardless of which side of the family we identify with; yet again, Ross’s conservatism confines Leslie exclusively to the domestic sphere, without question or complaint. The closest we get to hearing Leslie’s opinions comes soon after, when Abigail shares her daughter’s letters with Ben. Ann Dowd’s performance, and the composition of the two characters in an establishing two-shot (Abigail leaning in attentively, Ben cross-legged on the floor like an obedient child) betray a quiet affection and communion with Ben that is absent from the character of Jack; like Leslie, Abigail is a woman who carefully navigates the men in her life. Both choose what to reveal to whom and when, how best to support their husbands and sons (or in Abigail’s case, son-in-law) to make them happy while also keeping the peace. Her sharing of the letter is clearly intended to comfort and console, describing as it does the perfection of Leslie and Ben’s experiment, ‘unique in all of human existence’. The classical references (‘a paradise out of Plato’s republic, our children will be philosopher kings’) highlight Leslie’s intellectualism and a theorising of their life which she has in common with Ben. However this idealised depiction is undercut by her instruction to ‘burn the other letter’. This calls back quite explicitly to Ben’s description of Leslie’s bipolar disorder during dinner at Harper and Dave’s house – if the burned letter was the product of a depressive period, is this one the product of mania? Even if we assume that this letter is the ‘truth’, Leslie self-edits, cutting and destroying inconvenient or unpleasant aspects of her narrative. Ultimately, Leslie’s version of herself is just as fractured and incomplete as that constructed by other characters’ testimony.

    The final question is how these conflicting ideas are to be reconciled. Leslie is dead, so to a certain extent they can’t be; she remains an enigma, not just for the spectator, but also for the other characters. Resolution comes instead in the reconciliation of the Cash family, something which can only be achieved by returning Leslie to the fold; she is the unifying mother who brings together their various identities. The grim humour of the cemetery sequence gives way to the final journey on Steve with the family all together again, with the children looking on lovingly as they prepare for her cremation. The aesthetic here is strikingly similar to the opening montage that introduced us to Leslie’s domestic domain, with the group bathed in warm high key lighting. The colours of her hair and their clothes are just as vibrant as the jewel-coloured preserves at the beginning. Now however, the frame is filled not by lonely objects, but by the family themselves, finally at peace in each other’s company. The subtext is clear: it is only when they are all together again that their conflicts can be resolved. In death as in life, it is Leslie’s presence that reunites the family and fixes frayed bonds – and in so doing she fulfils her narrative purpose. The conflicts around Leslie’s identity and agency remain unaddressed because fundamentally because her conflicts have never been Ross’s primary concern. Even when physically present, she remains incomplete and enigmatic; idealised, fragmented and, to the last, subjugated to the needs of the family.