“We’re all just waiting to see what we’ve been kept here for.” Claire (Kerry Condon)
Robert Granier (Joel Edgerton) waits patiently at the turn of the 20th century for the beauty he quietly experiences in the Pacific Northwest. He’s a loner logging and railroading until he meets his love, Gladys (Felicity Jones), builds a cabin, and has a baby.
Train Dreams (Netflix) is a quiet treatise on the dreams of a rugged, poetic loner dealing with the changes brought to the wilderness and the tragedies that accompany any life robust enough to look Nature in the eye, accept its beauty, and deal with its harsh reality either from bad men or capricious life. More than once he exclaims to his wife and child about the beauty of life while he accepts the horrors that come inevitably in raw nature and the dangerous luxury of living away from civilization.
As a rail worker he witnesses malevolence of rogue workers murdering helpless immigrants as well as the indiscriminate horror of unchecked wild fires. His urge to be with his family is itself checked by the demands of the burgeoning forestry industry and the link he shares with everyone else clamoring to get on board with progress symbolized by the train and the dreams it foments and the evils it ushers.
After being untethered from his family, he experiences life as director Terence Malik would depict it—at one with Nature and its beautiful and dangerous caprices. Robert asks nothing of Nature other than allowing him to partner with it as civilization careens into the future with chainsaws and mighty bridges.
Train Dreams is a poem about the vagaries and beauties of modern life just as, say Jeremiah Johnson and Grizzly might have witnessed it. The connection of the living and the dead is apparent in every image of director Clint Bentley: “The dead tree is as important as the living one.” (Claire)
Robert Granier is all of us wondering at the beauties of life and acceptance of the costs progress demands. One of the best movies of the year and a classic in the loner genre.
Joel Edgerton deserves the nominations that will be pouring in.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts NPR’s It’s Movie Time and Cinema Classics as well as podcasts Back Talk and Double Take (recently listed by Feedspot as two of the ten best NPR Movie Podcasts) out of WCBE 90.5 FM, Columbus, Ohio.Contact him at JohnDeSando52@gmail.com