Life has a funny way of slipping through our fingers. The mundanities of our everyday responsibilities pile upon us, inadvertently suffocating the intricate beauty, leaving us with a life that flows past us as quickly as a small pot down a stream. This very concept is what Netflix’s Train Dreams explores in remarkable fashion. A conundrum in and of itself because Robert Grainier, played with profound passion and effortless emotion by Joel Edgerton, is an unremarkable man.
Based on Denis Johnson’s renowned 2012 novella and narrated by the irreplaceable Will Patton, Train Dreams finds the exceptional in the everyday. Clint Bentley constructs a hypnotic expedition in Grainier’s ever-changing life. An orphan from the “age of 6 or 7,” the exact age of which he can’t remember, Grainier grew up in a small Idaho town at the threshold of the new century. He soon finds his days filled with logging, sawing, and aiding in the effort to satisfy America’s insatiable appetite for bridges and railways during the 1910s war effort.
Alongside scraggly-looking men who wear their years in the crevices of their fading, seldom smiles, Grainier exists in the midst of the seemingly boundless forests of the Pacific Northwest. Here, death surrounds him. Whether through that of a sapling, a fellow laborer from a felled tree or branch, or that of a friendship, expiration plants itself as sturdy as the mammoth trees.
The logging work that Grainier dedicates his life to doesn’t come without its sacrifices. Just as swiftly as it seems that Grainier falls in love with the incandescent Gladys Oakley (Felicity Jones), builds a cabin, and fathers a young daughter, so is he pulled back into the bowels of the never-ceasing woodland.
Aiming to quit as soon as he can, daydreams of spending time with his wife and daughter fill his mind just as the misty mountainsides of the Pacific Northwest fill each gorgeous frame of the film. Daydreams that are soon overtaken by the nightmarish visions of one of his Chinese workmates lingering by his side after he is rapidly absconded from his labor one day and tossed off the half-built bridge.
In one of several profound questions the movie asks, “Do you think the bad things we do follow us in life?” Grainier’s fascination with the many mysteries of life is shared. Although the movie is relatively small in literal scope, sharing physical space between the stunning wonder of the vast wilderness and the comforting modesty of a homestead, there is something epic in spirit. While the engine of the movie relies on moments of incident, such as an unplanned death, a joyous family photo when Grainier is home, or a rapacious forest fire, the life of the film is found in the in-between.
As time hastily challenges the life Grainier so desperately desires, he soon fades into a state of longing. A state of yearning. Yearning for a life that makes complete sense, yet burdened with one that is never comprehensible. This simultaneous juxtaposition revels in the euphoric cinematography of Adolpho Veloso and majestic score by Bryce Dessner (a score that, in a just world, would see an Academy Award win).
Edgerton is at the forefront of nearly every frame of this transcendent journey. The entire thematic arc depends on his ability to break through the often-thought-of “dress up” that a period piece offers an actor and make it distinctly human. He delivers a performance that is unparalleled in emotional depth. In a year full of capital B big movies that are the daily sustenance of film conversation online—One Battle After Another, Sinners, Frankenstein, and even the forthcoming Hamnet—Train Dreams carves out its own gentle home among the behemoths. It fulfills an emotional and technical capacity that the above, and nearly any other movie released this year, fail to satisfy.
Endorsed by a striking ensemble cast that includes the likes of a barely recognizable William H. Macy—an explosives expert named Arn Peeples that manifests the very soul of Train Dreams in his many poignant expressions, both physical and vocal—and Kerry Condon as a traveling forestry services worker, the wonder of the interconnectedness of life blossoms and blooms into something definitively unique.
A reckoning with our relationship to time and change is magnetically traced, with perhaps the strongest visual motif of the film being that of a pair of boots nailed to a tree, engulfed in moss as the years have passed through even them.
“There’s enough trees out here for us to cut for a thousand years,” declares one of the many hard-working men. In doing so, he fortifies the reality of man’s inescapable eagerness to tame all that surrounds him. (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s underseen and underappreciated Evil Does Not Exist (2023) distinctly shares this journey.) Within that eagerness, it is effortless to become lost to time and history. And yet, that fear of being lost to time with little to show for it is overrun with the simple and real hope of connection and love.
Grainier’s life seemingly passes him by, with things happening here and there. Brilliantly, the narration device, used with power and curiosity in the film’s introduction, grows sparser. It’s not lost on me the dual-meaning of nearly every artistic decision Bentley, Greg Kwedar—Bentley’s long-time creative partner, who was just nominated for an Academy Award last year for his Sing Sing screenplay—and team have tucked away neatly into each mesmerizing minute of Train Dreams. It’s what makes it one of the best movies of the year.
Films that find the extraordinary in the mundane are not new. But Train Dreams is able to eclipse that age-old trope in a way that is strangely comforting, even if it makes you cry for one hundred minutes straight. There is no movie like it this year. And there won’t be one. It is supremely special, just as Grainier’s seemingly simple life turns out to be.
Review Courtesy of Ethan Simmie
Feature Image Credit to Netflix