Train Dreams Is a Staggering Work of Art

Netflix just bought one of the best films of the year out of Sundance, but please, for the love of God, don’t watch this masterpiece on your phone. Photo: Adolpho Veloso

“There were once passageways to the old world,” a voiceover intones at the beginning of Train Dreams. “You’d turn a corner and find yourself faced with a great mystery.” As the narration (spoken by Will Patton) continues, we see tunnels, forests, a pair of boots nestled in a tree trunk — almost like they grew there — and a giant spruce slowly crashing to the ground. In telling the seemingly unremarkable life story of one ordinary man, Clint Bentley’s trancelike film, based on Denis Johnson’s acclaimed 2012 novella, ruminates on the interconnectedness of all things, but it wears its metaphysics lightly. It mimics the process of revelation itself, as the disparate episodes of one life gradually begin to feel like parts of an inexpressible whole.

Joel Edgerton, an actor who is getting a lot more interesting as he ages, plays Robert Grainier, an orphan who winds up in a small Idaho town sometime at the turn of the century and spends most of his life laboring as a choker, a sawyer, and a logger, working to cut trees for the war effort in the 1910s and America’s ever-expanding railways and bridges. Along the way, he falls in love with the headstrong, beautiful Gladys Oakley (Felicity Jones), builds a cabin, and starts a family. Grainier is not an educated man or one prone to romanticism and reflection. But lying with Gladys on the shore of the Moyie river, he observes, “Right now I could just about understand everything there is.”

One of the great highlights of this year’s Sundance Film Festival (and certainly one of the best pictures of the year), Train Dreams was just bought by Netflix for a handsome price. That may ensure the broadest potential audience, but one also hopes the streamer will do the right thing and give it a proper theatrical release. The film looks and sounds spectacular. It’s not long, but it has an epic spirit. And for all its artful, elliptical lyricism, it has a scale that demands a huge screen. Old-growth forests stretch to the very top edges of the frame. The landscape is filled with dusty mountains, misty horizons, and, sometimes, desolate and dead hills. Even the craggy faces of the men in close-up look like maps of uncharted terrain. All too often, actors playing rugged, physical laborers can come off like they’re doing dress-up. Here, shot in shadows cast by bonfires and thick forest canopies, they are both authentic and full of mystery.

That contrasts with the sun-dappled softness of Grainier’s home life, or at least his visions of it. With his logging work always taking him away, he constantly dreams of his wife and daughter, and these memories become more abstract as the film proceeds. The cruelty around him also powers these homesick reveries. In his youth, we’re told, he’d seen the brutal deportation of Chinese immigrants; “Grainier was baffled by the casualness of the violence,” the narrator informs us, but Grainier himself isn’t entirely immune to these evils as he gets older. When one of his Chinese workmates is seized right in the middle of a job, Grainier frantically asks what the man has done, but he also doesn’t try to stop the others as they carry the immigrant across a bridge and throw him off it.

The image of this dead Chinese man haunts Grainier for the rest of his days, but he also wonders whether the work they’re doing is cursed in other ways. “Do you think that the bad things we do follow us in life?” he asks at one point, and the question seems to encompass not just his personal sense of guilt but the constant cutting and carving up of the landscape that has determined his livelihood, a job he intends to abandon as soon as he’s able. To most of these workers, the vast forests of the Pacific Northwest imply an endless bounty of wood and lumber. “The world is intricately stitched together,” observes a grizzled, eccentric explosives expert (played by a scene-stealing, borderline-unrecognizable William H. Macy). “Every thread we pull, we know not how it affects the design of things.” Later, as Grainier finds himself out of step with the increasingly mechanized and impersonal nature of his job, he passes by a dead bear cast atop a pile of wood — a sign that our desire to tame and harness the wilderness inevitably leads to its destruction.

Like its protagonist, Train Dreams drifts along like a simple bowl floating downstream, an offhand image that itself appears during a late flashback. The obvious comparison here would be the work of Terrence Malick (particularly when it comes to representations of nature) and Malickian offshoots like Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, but I was reminded also of titles like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, Jun Ichikawa’s Tony Takitani, and Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. The movie is full of incident — there are shootings, sudden deaths, and even one spectacular forest fire that is practically Soviet in its symbolic grandeur — but nothing we might call a narrative per se. Instead, through Edgerton’s subtly tormented performance, Patton’s narration, Adolpho Veloso’s rapturous cinematography, and a quavering score by Bryce Dessner, the film draws us into Grainier’s sad, inexpressible longing for peace and purpose. The picture gets at the very nature of transcendence: The shape of the world only appears to us when it’s too late. Or, as a dying man observes at one point in Train Dreams, looking around at the gathering night: “It’s beautiful.” When asked what he’s referring to, he simply says, “All of it. Every bit of it.” Please, for the love of God, don’t watch this magnificent movie on your phone.