.png)
4 hours ago
5
Train Dreams is arguably the lowest-profile of all the Oscar best film nominees, and could have easily passed me by, destined instead to be lost in the sprawling Netflix library, if it weren’t for a phone call with a friend last year. She had just watched one of last year’s big films – which carried famous names, plenty of hype, and promised to generate lots of debate – and emerged feeling despondent about it as well as the state of cinema. It was a film that, like so many she had recently encountered, contained only empty provocations that amounted to nothing. “I don’t want to sound like a cliche,” she said, “but I believe this was all better in the 1970s!” Train Dreams was one of the few films of the year she had enjoyed.
So I came into Train Dreams, Clint Bentley’s adaptation of the Denis Johnson novella, with that idea in mind: that it was a thing out of step with our time and possibly better for it, too. Immediately, its use of a kindly voiced omniscient narrator recalled Hollywood classics of the late 20th century. Our voice of God drops us into Bonners Ferry, Idaho, in the early 1900s, to the life of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), a man who drifts through his first two decades without much purpose before he falls in love with the free-spirited Gladys (Felicity Jones).
I’d been watching many recent films with fast cuts, frenetic pacing and jangly, intense music, so I was struck by Train Dreams’s meditative pace – it has been compared to the films of Terrence Malick – with a gentle score by the National’s Bryce Dessner. To support Gladys and their new daughter, Katie, Robert takes a job as a logger, where he drifts with itinerant men, including a terrific William H Macy as Arn, a chatty explosives expert. Here Adolpho Veloso’s cinematography has great fun ranging across the verdant landscape that Robert and his fellow loggers are cutting down, taking in breathtaking vistas and majestic trees tumbling into the wilderness.
What also makes Train Dreams seem anachronistic is its sincere interest in moral questions, which feels out of step with our time of widespread villainy. While working on the railroads, Robert witnesses the murder of his Chinese colleague and friend Fu Sheng in what is presumably, given the film’s nods to Chinese exclusion laws, a racist attack. Robert, who watches on in resignation, is soon haunted by his actions. “Do the bad things we do follow us through life?” he later asks Arn. Arn isn’t so sure about karmic justice – “I’ve seen bad men raised up and good men brought to their knees” – but still believes that our choices leave an indelible mark. “We just cut down trees that have been here for 500 years,” he tells his colleagues. “It upsets a man’s soul whether you recognise it or not.”
That we should be interested in matters of good and evil as they pertain to our souls: what a novel idea to some of the world’s most powerful people today! In less exalted realms, there’s also something acute about the film’s character study of Robert, a drifter haunted by his failures, who spends his life waiting for a grand revelation that never seems to arrive, and only starts to get “a faint understanding of his life” by the time it begins “slipping away from him”.
That line made me think of one scene in the film where we watch two people have a conversation from up high. It was as though we were looking at humanity from the point of view of these ancient trees: down below, the humans looked like little ants scuttling around, trying to make meaning of their limited time here.
