The themes of time and guilt are ribboned together in Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, a modest yet sweeping period drama set in the Pacific Northwest during the first half of the 20th century. Based on a Denis Johnson novella, the film chronicles a fictional — although clearly meant to evoke the sort of nondescript everyman who toiled anonymously in the name of Western expansion and “taming” the wilderness — logger named Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), from his early childhood until his death as an old man in the 1960s. The character represents the tip of the spear in the changing face of America while existing entirely outside of its effects. A recluse of the soulful, non-cantankerous variety, Robert embraces isolation as a penance for the harm he believes he’s caused the world, living out his days in the cabin he built and unable to reconcile the violence he’s personally witnessed with a pre-psychological understanding of causation or shame. The years pass and the country civilized itself around him, yet Robert retreats further inward out of fear and crippling despair.
The inciting incident of Train Dreams — although even using that term implies a much more plot-centric film than what this is — arrives early and with little announcement. While working as a logger in his 20s, clearing trees to make way for railroad tracks, Robert witnesses a Chinese laborer being assaulted and dragged off to be murdered by white workers without explanation. Robert, even in his confusion, tries to intervene, getting himself kicked by the desperate man in the ensuing scrum but ultimately helpless to do more than watch as the laborer is thrown to his death from a trestle into the gorge below. Violence and death are not uncommon in this trade, a “welcome” byproduct of late capitalism that allows for little time to bury those killed on the job site before it’s back to work, but the death of the Chinese man haunts Robert — literally even, in that over the course of years he finds the dead man silently staring at him from across campfires or appearing in the frantically edited, foreboding dreams that give the film its title. Robert will never understand who this man was or why he was killed — in the absence of anything else the viewer is left to infer racism was the motivating factor — but he views the man’s murder as a dark cloud that follows him wherever he goes, striking down those in his proximity as though they had become caught up in death’s grand design for Robert. Life was hard in the early 1900s, but it was harder still if you believed the universe, as you understood it, was aligned against you.
It would be unfair to call Robert “simple.” Rather, he’s a product of his era, surroundings, and the circumstances of his rearing. We learn via the film’s abundant narration, recorded by the actor Will Patton and retaining large passages of Johnson’s prose, that Robert was an orphan who never knew his family, shipped off to the Western part of the U.S. as a child at which point he was put to work early doing hard labor. The character lives an uninterrogated life, possessing few outside interests and saying little to the men he worked alongside, instead preferring to serve as a sounding board for assorted loquacious coots played by the likes of William H. Macy and mid-aughts indie-film mainstay Paul Schneider. The character possesses the qualities of a cipher, but not out of laziness on the film’s part or without purpose. Robert comes to represent something universal in anyone who’s ever put their head down and dedicated themselves to work to support a family only to wake up one day and realize how much time has passed and how fleeting the happiness of time with loved ones is. Robert marries Gladys (Felicity Jones, who between this and The Brutalist is carving out a lane for herself as an accessory-cum-support system to the tortured psyche of the early 20th-century man) and they have a daughter together. But the work demands that Robert spend most of the year in the wilderness while Gladys and the baby live alone in their cabin. When Gladys suggests that she and the child travel with him as part of his next rotation into the wilderness, so that the family may remain together year-round, Robert demurs. The ache at not being there to see his little girl grow up eats at him, but he recognizes how dangerous a profession logging is and can’t bear the idea of Gladys or the baby being caught under his dark cloud.
And yet something unimaginably tragic still befalls Robert’s family; something he would have been helpless to prevent, yet he blames himself for it nonetheless. And because Robert lives in a time where the population is dispersed and information is not easily disseminated, he is tormented by a misplaced sense of hope that distorts his better judgment, making him a prisoner in the husk of his former life. The conventional shape of Western drama tells us that this is merely adversity for the character to overcome, perhaps ushering in a new chapter of their lives where they emerge stronger or wizened by the experience. Instead, Train Dreams down-shifts; years that once passed in a blink of an eye now drag on, seemingly endlessly, without reprieve or relief from a profound sadness which takes root in Robert. Trauma becomes a metaphorical scar that he’s forced to confront every day for the rest of his life. The world continues to change — axes giving way to mechanized saws, wooden structures are replaced by concrete ones, gas lamps are made obsolete by electricity — and yet Robert refuses to engage with it or leave the safety of the bubble he’s created for himself. After a meet cute with a forestry services employee (Kerry Condon) that announces a potential new romantic avenue, the film upends expectations by doubling down on the suffocating nature of grief and how it’s not merely a piece of luggage that you can simply let go of once you’re tired of carrying it. Further, the film argues, even in our unhappiness and apparent lack of purpose we remain God’s creatures (“the world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit”). It’s the stuff of bromides, yes, but the film’s sincerity and commitment to the restlessness of the human condition — and for that matter, its unwillingness to entertain pat solutions to a spiritual crisis — has an integrity to it that transcends greeting card sentiments.
Since Train Dreams premiered at last winter’s Sundance Film Festival, where it was a splashy acquisition by Netflix — truly a Faustian bargain that ensures that this meditative film, shot in academy ratio and lit largely with natural light or by candles, will primarily be viewed at home by people playing on their phones — the film has drawn comparisons to Terrence Mallick, which makes for an easy cudgel to wield against it. The similarities are there but are superficial: the low-angle shots emphasizing the beauty and serenity of the natural world; the disembodied voiceover; the plain-spoken naturalism and unforced intimacy of the performances, and so on. Yet Train Dreams is far more emotionally direct in its approach, closer in style and disposition to the lyrical naturalism of David Lowery’s films or the storybook mythos of Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. There’s nothing terribly inscrutable about Train Dreams in large part because the narration provides such a clear guide path for the viewer (the film is far more novelistic than impressionistic). Nor for that matter is Bentley’s film particularly concerned with faith or the metaphysical, the dreams of the film’s title notwithstanding. Instead, Train Dreams remains unfailingly focused on the interconnected nature of the material world (something made all the more ironic by Robert choosing to emotionally disengage from it) and being buffeted by forces outside the understanding of the characters but internalized by the viewer. It’s the sort of film where supporting characters often serve as founts of folksy, almost certainly revisionist, sentiments about, say, the moral stain of felling a 200-year-old tree (“this world is intricately stitched together… we’re pulling bolts out of a Ferris wheel, thinking ourselves gods”). But above all else, Train Dreams is about recognizing that we’re collectively building a world meant for others to inherit and the knowledge that a lifetime of toil will be literally bulldozed in the name of perpetual progress — and what that does to someone when their personal vision for the future is ripped from the fabric of their lives.
As with last year’s Sing Sing, Train Dreams was co-written by Bentley and Greg Kwedar (the two men conceive of all their projects together and alternate who directs on a project-by-project basis), and there’s a heart-on-its-sleeve quality to both films that’s defiantly “uncool.” Train Dreams is the more polished effort, but it similarly is a lump-in-your-throat weepie about the body being carried along by the slipstream of time while the spirit is staked to a past it cannot escape. Ironically, for a film this gentle and L.L.Bean-coded, the best summation of its ethos comes from none other than Chris Rock: “You know, some people say life is short and that you could get hit by a bus at any moment and that you have to live each day like it’s your last. Bullshit. Life is long. You’re probably not gonna get hit by a bus. And you’re gonna have to live with the choices you make for the next 50 years.”
DIRECTOR: Clint Bentley; CAST: Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones, Clifton Collins Jr., Alfred Hsing; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; IN THEATERS: November 7; STREAMING: November 21; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 42 min.
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