Train Dreams is one of those immersive films whose images invite you in and then linger with you long after the final scene. The filmgoer is invited again and again to see makes this story a universal one and establishes how one person, one presence, is connected to everything else.
Sensitively directed by Clint Bentley, the film is based on the novella by Denis Johnson with a screenplay by Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar. It tells the life story of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) in the Pacific Northwest through the twentieth century. This world is brought vividly to our senses by the exquisite cinematography of Adolpho Veloso. Skillful narration is provided by Will Patton.
An orphan, Robert was sent west on a train, and eventually went to work for the railroad expanding into the area, cutting down trees for the rails and bridges. After an incident that will haunt him his whole life – witnessing the murder of a Chinese man by racist workers -- he moves further into the forest to a logging camp filled with other itinerant men.
It's dangerous work with the possibility of tragedy accompanying every falling tree. Boots nailed to the tree trunks mark where someone has died, lest they be forgotten. Memories resonate throughout the forest, and Robert, a reflective man, seems to discover them as he contemplates the tall trees. He watches and listens more than he talks, yet he forges deep friendships. When one of the oldest loggers (Willliam Macy) comments on the beauty of the ancient trees, he agrees.
“Beautiful, isn’t it.”
“What is?”
“All of it. Every bit of it.”
The deepest relationship in his life is with Gladys (Felicity Jones). After she introduces herself at church during one of his times in town, they fall in love, marry, and build a house on an acre of land by a river. The birth of a daughter gives them both great joy. But Robert has to be away for long periods of time for his work. And the hardships of his daily life do not prepare him for the tragedies he endures.
Feelings, even for a quiet introspective man like Robert, cannot be suppressed. Joy and sorrow, happiness and sadness, smiles and tears -- the experience of one intensifies our awareness of the other. In the most spiritually literate scene in the film, Robert goes to visit Claire Thompson (Kerry Condon) of the newly formed forest service. She is living in a tower from which she can watch for wildfires and survey the renewal of the forest after all the logging. He confesses his sadness, and she tells him her husband had died a year earlier.
“When you go through something like that, nothing you do is crazy,” she admits. “You just go through what you go through. In the forest, every least thing’s important. It’s all threaded together so you can’t tell where one thing ends and another begins. If you really look at it, the little insects you can’t even see, they play a role as vital as the river. The dead tree is as important as the living one. There must be something for us to learn from that. . . . The
world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit.”
Train Dreams is a masterwork on the spiritual practices of beauty, love, reverence, and connections. It’s beautiful. All of it. Every bit of it.