“Train Dreams” is a forlorn folk ballad with pretensions of being a tone poem.
This downboat but picturesque saga of one man’s life during the lumbering-mad early years of the 20th century is both intimate and remote. We see a life closely-observed and lived in Big Sky Country by a solitary and simple man looking for meaning and never quite giving away that he’s found it.
It’s based on a novella by Denis Johnson, a long short story which implies lots of cinematic room to expand on characters, situations and dialogue while hanging onto the the life-death-and-not-exactly-“rebirth: themes. Johnson’s “Jesus’s Son” and “Stars at Noon” were also turned into films, albeit movies almost no one saw.
Here Clint Bentley of “Sing Sing” and “Jockey” fame is the director and co-screenwriter. He tends towards “elegaic,” and with this film, it feels as if he’s reaching for something broad, deep and evocative, a sort of Terrence Malick (“Badlands,” “Days of Heaven” and “The Tree of Life”) meditation on life and nature.
There’s no dishonor in falling short of that. Bentley’s film is watchable — beautiful in its reveries, sad in it’s laments — but somewhat less than great. And the more I chew on it, the less satisfying it seems.
Bentley shot it in the little-used 3:2 aspect ratio, a narrow “boxy” frame meant to remind us of old photographs (but doesn’t) in the images of virgin forests facing the axe, sunsets on the high plains and railroad tracks receding into the woody horizon. Those cinematic picture frames, which are among the film’s great assets, are less than spectacular, majestic and soul-stirring in that chopped frame.
Malick wouldn’t have made that mistake. Nor would Costner, Redford or Campion.
And our lonesome hero’s story is voice-over narrated, seemingly taking every line of description, back-story and narration from the novella and having the actor Will Patton read it for the screen, when in many cases, the image alone — with Joel Edgerton‘s senstive turn as the lead — tells the story and ponders the mysteries the movie never solves, even with that remedial narrative boost.
Malick and many a more confident filmmaker would have eschewed this as the needless, self-conscious writerly crutch that it is. The movie’s mystery is part of its allure, and all that yakking about who is thinking what don’t solve the mystery. So why disturb the peace?
Edgerton plays Robert Grainier, who grew up an orphan to live his entire adult life mostly in Idaho, with railroad crew and lumbering treks as far east as Montana and far west as Spokane.
Grainier is an Idaho introvert who probably never would have met and married the love of his life (Felicity Jones) had she not made the first move.
In the years during and after the First World War, they build a cabin on an acre beside a river and have a happy if lean life, raising a little girl out on the edge of the forest.
They have chickens and perhaps a garden. And wife Gladys is handy with a firearm. She’s the hunter of the family. To make ends meet, they need Robert’s income from cutting lumber or clearing land through mountains and gorges for railroad lines.
A litany of tragedies bedeviled Robert’s early life, and when he sees a Chinese railroad laborer publicly murdered by the rail gang for reasons unknown, he has a horror that will stick with him always. Did he do enough beyond complaining “What’s he done?” The narration mentions mass deportations of previous years, as if this will be a big theme of the movie.
It isn’t.
Visions of Fu Shing (Alfred Hsing) stick with Robert, displacing the nightmares about a murdered man (Clifton Collins Jr.) Robert saw bleed out as a child. The random dangers of lumbering work in that pre-OSHA era hang over every day in the woods on the job. Accidents with big saws among big trees are a given.
Among the blowhards, braggarts and silent types Grainier encounters, a colorful old-timer Arn (William H. Macy) stands out. His declining strength limits his usefulness in the actual tree cutting. But he eulogizes the ever retreating forest line and laments the majestic trees, “over 500 years old,” that they’re chopping down as fast as they can get to them.
Arn’s seen things and might give Robert new perspective.
“It’s just beautiful.”
“What is, Arn?”
“All of it. Every bit of it.”
But the script doesn’t let itself sentimentalize nature in some John Muir early environmentalist reverie. It doesn’t address the guilt at the murderous racism Robert witnesses, or the random nature of violence depicted here and the dangerous, destructive work that might be a metaphor of warning.
It just takes us through a hard life, with periods of domestic harmony and the long mourning that accompanies personal tragedy.
We can’t get too attached to anybody or anything, and yet we do. And we suffer when we lose them.
Graingier may believe he’s dogged by tragedy because of some transgression, that he carries every bad thing that he’s been a part of with him to the grave. A lady forest ranger (Kerry Condon) comes as close as anyone to explaining why life goes on after something happens to you.
We’re all “just waiting to see what we’ve been kept here for.”
That’s kind of deep and sort of poetic, which is why it stands out enough to quote. But as somewhat famous faces (Nathaniel Arcand, Paul Schneider, John Diehl, Collins and Condon) pass by and register but serve little to no purpose in the plot, we’re entitled to think we’re entitled to more.
There’s pathos in the deaths that pass us by, but they lack the punch in the gut we feel we deserve and that might somehow change or educate the shocked but silent about it Grainier.
I enjoyed this world, random and sometimes melodramatic tragedies included, and the people who populate it. Macy in particular stands out in the cast, but everybody does justice to their roles, even the ones barely sketched in and here for but a scene or two.
“Train Dreams” feels as if it’s supposed to be bigger than it is — soulful or soul-stirring even. It never gets there. And at some point we have a right to expect more than musing voice-over narration.
“A River Runs Through It” was just as scenic and just as heavily narrated and still had a point. For all its attempted ethereal touches, “Train Dreams” never settles on a track that delivers one.
Rating: PG-13, violence, sex
Cast: Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones, Nathaniel Arcand, Alfred Hsing, John Diehl, Paul Schneider, Clifton Collins, Jr., Kerry Condon and William H. Macy.
Credits: Directed by Clint Bentley, scripted by Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar, based on a novella by Denis Johnson. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:43
