It seems that Train Dreams is so named because of how spectacular and innovative the technology of train travel was to the life at the centre of the film. It is set almost entirely in Idaho and western Washington state and shows a style of living that might as well be prehistoric now (though by ending in the late 1960s the life depicted here overlaps with that of my parents). It is also, in the best possible way, a quiet examination of just what it means to be human and a thoughtful contemplation of how hard it is to be alive. It is a stunning achievement.
This is one of the rare works of art that knows in its bones how there are fates worse than death. At least a death you can grieve, you can find community in your loss, and if it helps you can atone. You are not left in the horrible limbo of waiting for something which you know is impossible but you cannot let go of. If that happens to you, it’s like being split into pieces: the part of you that goes to work and does the dishes and meets the needs of the body is never truly at rest, because it is waiting. And if you have a waiting part of you, whether what you’re anticipating is a better job or a change in the weather or for someone you love to come home, you are stuck. And Robert (Joel Edgerton, more on whom later) is stuck. He spends his life waiting even as he chops down trees and tends the land outside his little cabin and eats breakfast and puts his shoes on one at a time. But even while you’re waiting life continues. The world doesn’t stop for you, or anyone. There’s the weather, and heart attacks, murders, justice achieved and justice denied. Engines replace horses. Young men with strong backs replace older ones who used to be strong. The baby starts walking, and talking. You wonder what she’s thinking about, how she learns. If she knows her own name.
The story is beautifully narrated in voiceover by Will Patton, who also read the audiobook of the novella by Denis Johnson from which director Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar adapted the script. Robert was an orphan sent as a child to work on a farm in Idaho with his name and some clothes on his back. The fate of his birth parents, much less their own names, was never provided, and he grows up with a sense of hunger that is never really sated. At church one Sunday he meets Gladys (Felicity Jones, doing a lot with very little) and can hardly believe his luck that she falls in love with and marries him. They buy an acre or so of land by the creek outside the town and build a little cabin, where Gladys stays with the baby while Robert goes to work in various logging camps around the northwest. The work is dangerous and violent and at one point Robert makes a mistake that haunts him for the rest of his life. It’s a bad mistake but Robert keeps the shame of it to himself. And significantly worse is to come.
Mr. Edgerton is an extraordinary actor whose talent is underappreciated because he has built a difficult speciality for himself: men who don’t express themselves verbally. His expertise is men who show their love by building a cradle instead of telling his wife he loves her, who notice the way the wind whistles through the leaves but who wouldn’t know how to articulate that knowledge, even if there was someone interested in their thoughts, which mostly there isn’t. He is mesmerising at playing the kind of men who do the kind of physical work in which no one expects them to have a brain, and there is a through line from his Texan cop who throws over his life for his friend’s little boy in Midnight Special to the white man who marries a black woman when that was illegal in Loving to his work here. It’s an unshowy style, without either of the chattiness that men like Harrison Ford or Colin Farrell are known for, or the action chops that Alan Ritchson or Jason Statham provide. But it’s all the more incredible for how vividly Mr. Edgerton expresses Robert’s feelings, and how thoroughly you feel you understand his thoughts even though he doesn’t say much.
And this is precisely the point. There are more men than we realise who get up, go to work, eat dinner, pay the bills and nobody pays them all that much attention. They’re slightly on the edge of society for one reason or another, and not necessarily because they want to be, but they’ve learned to keep their eyes down and their thoughts safely inside their own heads. Sometimes if you’re lucky you can make a friend, maybe even one like Arn (William H. Macy), an old feller in the logging camps who can only handle the lightest work but whose thoughtful campfire insights means no one complains about it. Robert appreciates every little bit of luck that comes his way but there’s not that much of it, and cinematographer Adolpho Veloso films the good things and the awful with the same tender style. The work of Terence Malick is a major influence, but the mood is extremely similar to that of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (as in that masterpiece, Paul Schneider also has a key small part here, too). Those movies and the books on which they’re based share the same quiet hunger for beauty and the same desperate knowledge that such beauty will almost always be denied. Mr. Patton’s omniscient voiceover is kind and knowing as it describes Robert’s thoughts and feelings to us in a way that perhaps he couldn’t even express to himself. The passing of time and the importance of hope has rarely provided more feeling.
This is only Mr. Bentley’s second feature film but it’s clear he’s an enormous talent, expert at building mood and enabling an unusual life to come through the screen. By the end of the showing I attended everybody was crying, by which I mean we were all shedding tears of recognition like when people cry at a wedding. At a wedding you know what’s before the bride and groom, and we know what’s before us, too. And the greatest surprise of all is that this sad story ends with a moment of entirely earned grace. Train Dreams is an extraordinary experience, one of the transcendent ones a lot of art aims for but very few achieve. Watch it and your heart will be eased.
Train Dreams is now available to stream on Netflix.
Learn more about the film, including how to watch, at the Netflix site for the title.
You might also like…
