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This article originally appeared in our sister publication, Portland Mercury.
Train Dreams introduces us to the story of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) by considering his life’s footprint on a map. Orphaned early on, he grows up by the Moyie River in Idaho, before finding work in the 1920s as a logger, traveling west to the old growth forests of Washington. He never sees the ocean but comes within 90 miles or so of the coast. He doesn’t make it very far eastward, either.
His life was small. Our narrator—the wizened tone of Will Patton—says as much in the movie’s opening moments. Robert didn’t cover much ground; he was geographically insignificant and arguably unremarkable. The only thing exceptional about Robert is his quiet. Director Clint Bentley may have given Train Dreams a narrator because Robert is a soul who needs one. Someone’s got to sound out his loneliness.
All of this we learn with a few words and fewer minutes. Adapted by Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar (who together wrote last year’s Sing Sing) from a novella of the same name by Denis Johnson, Train Dreams takes Robert’s story and gives it shape and weight.
Events on Robert’s timeline threaten to enlarge his life. He courts his one and only love, Gladys, (Felicity Jones, who seems to be playing her character from The Brutalist: a long-distance wife carrying the fire of a better life in her chest) and together they build a cabin and family by the river. But Robert must leave every year to find work. First he’s laying rail lines to open up the forests and then he’s logging, tramping into eastern Washington for months while his young daughter grows exponentially every time he sees her anew.
Afield from his home, Robert experiences first-hand the sea change of the Pacific Northwest as industry arrives to the country’s final frontier, in the early 20th century. Workers make way for machines and are then replaced by them. Diesel and electric power usurp steam; chainsaws cut away the need for an extra man to hold the other side of the saw.
These shifting rhythms are obvious but seemingly insurmountable to Robert. When he’s a helpless bystander in the cold-blooded murder of a Chinese laborer, all he can do is see the man’s face in his dreams, more than any other face, for the rest of his life. Viscerally, the breadth of Robert’s life can be measured not in expansion, not in the amount of ground covered, but in loss.
A demolition expert—of sorts—on a few of Robert’s logging crews, Arn Peeples (William H. Macy) plants the idea in Robert’s head that the trees they’re logging are centuries old. They represent thousands of massive lives cut down, in a way that no life may ever catch up again. Macy is stupendous, nearly unrecognizable with beady eyes peering out from a bushel of wet beard, playing Arn as an affable contradiction, in that he both blows stuff up and preaches about preservation. But Arn isn’t approaching his revelation from a conservationist’s guilt, just from the reality of their jobs. They are pulling down massive, magnificent creatures, demarcating their progress by reducing the land to one pockmarked with chode-like trunks.
Edgerton’s performance is plotted in the words that have escaped him—in the emotions he does all he can to keep down. But he’s far from dour and even when the expected tragedy befalls him (as these kinds of stories typically entail), the actor reins in the immediate melancholy, giving it space and time to become part of the firmament of his existence. He plays Robert as a man who shares his grief with the world that surrounds him because that world is actually big enough to contain it. This is how he moves forward against the tides of loneliness that simultaneously swell and constrain his life.
Filmed around Spokane, eastern Washington, and western Idaho, Train Dreams is very plainly one of the most beautiful films of the year, rapt with the ineffable ways in which we are connected, bound even, to the dark and musty earth.
Of course, comparisons to filmmaker Terrence Malick (especially his 2011 epoch-defining film, The Tree of Life) are unavoidable. Cinematographer Adolpho Veloso luxuriates in the unblemished forest, not only posing Robert’s tiny person against the majesty of the plants he’s hired to destroy, but holding long takes on busy logging encampments, allowing the viewer to live within the staggering depth of these images.
Unlike Malick, Veloso brings no symbols or portent to his lovely compositions, just the sense that such sights require our deference. When a tree falls, we feel that empty space where it once stood. We wrestle with that astonishment, at its sudden absence. Following the course of Robert’s mostly-wordless life, Train Dreams shows how technology has outpaced our capacity to hold anything in silent awe.
It’s ironic, maybe, that Netflix bought this movie at Sundance for somewhere in the “high-teen millions,” affording it a short theatrical window to fulfill award requisites before debuting it on their service near the end of the month.
Because Train Dreams is indebted to the acute pain of loss—how that loss will get the smallest lives to emerge like huge grizzly-bear-gods from the flora of history—and Netflix is more responsible for the loss of theatrical culture than any other unyielding corporate monster, it’s a strange home for the film. A work like this, which is about the connectedness of all living things, does not belong on Netflix, where any sense of community goes to die.
This film is teeming with life. It should be seen in a theater, preferably in the Pacific Northwest—if you’re lucky. And it should be seen with Bryce Dessner’s sappy score simmering behind every inch of ground in its path, sawing the shit out of your heartstrings. For all of Robert’s silence, Train Dreams is loud with love, particularly for this green-dense place on a map that we call home.
Train Dreams opens at Landmark Crest Cinema Center, 16505 5th Avenue Northeast, Shoreline, WA; Fri Nov 7, tickets and showtimes and via streaming on Netflix, Fri Nov 21.
