Train Dreams
Melancholy and melodic, this quiet exploration of a hermit's life contains moments of great, clanging profundity.
Editor’s note: This review previously ran as part of Heartland Film Festival coverage; we’re reposting it timed with its regular theatrical release.
“Train Dreams” is a quiet, still movie. It sneaks up on you like skittering autumn leaves.
You think it’s just a simple, spare story about the life of a forest hermit in Idaho. He grows from child to manhood, stumbles into a family, and then suffers aching decades of loneliness and regret.
And yet, for all its lack of traditional storytelling, this melancholy and melodic exploration from director/co-writer Clint Bentley (an Oscar nominee for “Sing Sing”) contains moments of great, clanging profundity.
I’m reminded of movies like “Nomadland” and “A River Runs Through It,” films unafraid to patiently sit with a subject and and explore it from the inside out rather than hurrying through a “this-then-that” plot. To this list you could also add Bentley’s own directorial debut, “Jockey,” a beautiful little film virtually nobody saw but which is quite worth a visit.
It’s not an overstatement to call these kinds of movies spiritual without foisting any overt religiosity.
Joel Edgerton plays the hermit, Robert Grainier, a guy who came from seemingly nowhere — not even knowing his parents’ name or his birth year — and whose passing will barely be noticed by the rest of humanity. He worked mostly as a logger, taking long train rides to the remote corners of the American West to help scalp the wilderness of old tree growth.
The screenplay, by Bentley and Greg Kwedar, is adapted from the novella of the same name by Denis Johnson.
It’s entirely possible that Robert, a taciturn and quiet fellow, would have lived out his entire days without anything that could even be called a friendship, as his fellow workmen tend to come and go from season to season and job to job. As it happens, a woman comes into his life, Gladys, played by Felicity Jones. She is forthright, possibly even bold for a woman in the early 1900s, but scarcely before we can catch our breath they are in love.
The build a cabin by a small river and give birth to a baby girl. Robert is enthralled with this life — wandering the forests, growing things in their garden, feeding the chickens, sharing this happiness with his family. The sun-dappled cinematography by Adolpho Veloso and unobtrusive yet haunting music by Bryce Dessner allow us to revel alongside Robert.
He makes good money logging, but it also requires him to be away from home for months at at time. Gladys begins to push for him to work closer by, maybe even open a sawmill. The next stage of their life seems spread out before them.
Without giving anything away, one day Robert comes home and his wife and daughter are gone. He searches for them — days, weeks, months — but they are not to be found. He gives up, sleeps on the ground and would probably die without the help of the closest thing he has to a friend, Ignatius Jack (Nathaniel Arcand), who owns a sundries store in town.
The years go on. Robert still waits, even though he knows they are not coming back. He starts a trade as a transporter. He meets with a spunky woman, Claire Thompson (Kerry Condon), who has taken job in a watchtower of the new U.S. Forestry Service, keeping an eye out for fires.
Robert, who has barely spoken for years, confides to Claire that he thinks his sadness is the only thing keeping him alive. They are of a similar age and disposition, so we think we know what must happen.
Other actors flit in and out of the story, never for very long. William H. Macy plays Arn Peeples, the old dynamiter whose services are only called upon occasionally, and who pretty much talks or sings nonstop in between. He blows things up for a living, but seems to truly appreciate the beauty of the natural world they are slowly destroying.
Paul Schneider is Apostle Jack, similar talkative but with a biblical bent. Clifton Collins Jr. turns up for literally a minute, just long enough to die. Will Patton provides the narration, almost a lament in tone.
It’s an incredibly affecting performance by Edgerton, who seemingly does not have very much to do, but fills the emptiness of Robert’s life with so much richness and turmoil. If he were educated, he might have ended up a poet or philosopher like Thoreau. His patience is both the source of his meekness, and his heroism.
Robert is haunted by visions of his earlier life, presented sometimes as long dreams and sometimes as short, sharp blinks of memory. Seeing a Chinese laborer summarily killed while working on a railroad results in the man becoming a frequent companion, staring in an accusatory way for his not interfering. Of course, happy moments with Gladys and the baby make for happier recollections.
“Train Dreams” is the story of a man who doesn’t seem to have a led a very useful or purposeful life. In the end, it has so much meaning we actually envy him.