Lost in the Woods: Movie Review of Train Dreams
★★★★
By Geoff Carter
Illustration by Michael DiMilo
Some movies are plot-driven and action-packed narratives that grab you by the collar and pull you through heart-stopping adventures without ever letting go. Raiders of the Lost Ark, Predator, and Die Hard (a Christmas movie? The debate rages on) are prime examples of this sort of crowd-pleasing film fare. They grab you and don’t let you go. These films are—when done well—great entertainment, and sometimes—occasionally, they transcend themselves.
Other films aren’t quite as aggressive. They simply seem to happen, to unfold, like the wings of a bird. Terence Malik pioneered this sort of filmmaking. Last year’s Zone of Interest is another example of this sort of unforced narrative. This story of the placid, even banal, life of the commandant’s family behind the walls of Auschwitz does not force the narrative to the viewers; they are forced instead to construct it, to piece together the subtle hints and follow the breadcrumbs that reveal the true barbarity of that family.
Train Dreams is another film that slowly unfolds, revealing its intent slowly and inevitably. It is a non-linear examination of one man’s life. Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) is a logger leading a simple life. He lives in a one-room cabin with his wife Gladys (Felicity Jones) and their baby girl Kate.
Grainier has to travel for his work and is gone from his family for months at a time. His crews are responsible for felling some of the oldest and mightiest trees in America. At one point, the film flashes back to a stint he worked with a railroad crew where he witnessed one of his workmates, Fu Sheng (Alfred Hsing) a Chinese immigrant, thrown from a bridge. Robert is continually haunted by visions of this man and himself being struck by a train in his dreams.
Robert meets Gladys at church where she boldly introduces herself. They are quickly smitten with each other, marry, and build a cabin on the banks of the Moyie River. The couple are shown living an idyllic life in a pastoral setting. They are alone in the world until their daughter Kate arrives. Robert is shown to be a kind, almost tender man, with deep sensitivities, deeply devoted to him wife and child.
His experiences with other loggers, including a man who never says anything, another (a self-proclaimed Bible expert), who never shuts up, and more. When three loggers die in an accident, Robert realizes just how dangerous the work is and worries that there is retribution waiting for him.
At a later scene in a logging camp, Arn Peeples (William H. Macy), the demolitions expert and homespun philosopher (to me very reminiscent of Howard, the Walter Huston character in Treasure of the Sierra Madre) talks about their work, that cutting down a five-hundred-year-old tree does something to a man’s soul, whether he realizes it or not. He goes on to maintain that everything, even the trees, are connected and that pulling one thread has unknown consequences.
A few years later, Gladys comes up with a plan to start a sawmill which will keep Robert closer to home. He decides to go on one last logging trip but returns to find a wildfire has destroyed their cabin and that Gladys and Kate have disappeared. Robert searches for them for weeks and camps out on his land, hoping for their return. After some weeks, friend and former employer Ignatius Jack (Nathaniel Arcand) comes to see him and bring him food. Robert then allows himself to start grieving.
Still haunted by visions of Fu Sheng and hearing the voices of his dead wife and daughter, Robert stays in the woods, living as a hermit until he starts a freight business. There he encounters, Claire (Kerry Condon), a forest ranger hired by the CCC program. As he takes her to her lookout high in the hills, she speaks to him of the great glaciers that split and furrowed the land, of ice floes thousands of feet high. Robert, hoping to find answers about the meaning of his life, the flux of his pain, his wonder, and his joys, visits her. He makes other chance acquaintances, including one mysterious midnight encounter.
In his later years, Robert visits the city of Spokane where watches John Glenn circle the Earth on a storefront TV and sees how far technology has moved past him and his lonely life in the woods. When he sees a shot of the Earth broadcast from the planet, he seems able to acknowledge the connectedness of existence.
Train Dreams is a beautifully photographed movie. Scenes of quiet forest meadows and groves are intercut with the stoic sensitivity of Grainier’s face. The tranquility and mystery of the forest seems to be a reflection of his nature. He seems unmoved as his crews mow down the forest, clear-cutting entire mountainsides, but Arn’s words about the trees have disturbed him. He wonders about the woods, about what they are actually doing to the land—and to themselves.
Robert is a gentle man who does not even seem willing to shoot a deer. In fact, in an early scene during their union, it is Gladys who fells a buck with a fine shot, but Robert is forced to witness the beauty of the forest punctuated by the occasional violence of the men who populate it. The murder of Fen Shui and the deaths of the loggers and his friend Arn seem as random as Robert and Gladys’ love. These acts of violence seem to be intrusions on his life, intrusions Robert accepts but finds difficult to process. The noise and brutal efficiency of technology, like chainsaws and steam engines, have invaded the woods. The idyllic pastoral existence of his past is now part of America’s past. He has seen people murdered because of bigotry.
As the events of Robert’s life roll by in an unhurried non-linear narrative, Train Dreams becomes more of a meditation than a narrative. Robert’s life becomes a search for meaning. He wants the world to make sense. In the final scene, seeing the world from a birds-eye-view, he seems to have found at least a modicum of meaning and peace.
Train Dreams is an exemplary film. It combines the sensibilities of one simple man with the sweep and grandeur of the American landscape. It does exactly what Arn speaks of; it attempts to find the connections between the personal and the mythic in the arbitrary workings of the universe. As Robert sees the planet in its entirety, as he did when Arn spoke of the ancient forests and Claire spoke of the great glaciers, he realizes his life is part of something greater.
Joel Edgerton gives a beautifully understated performance as Robert. He is a kind and tender man who betrays nothing of that in his manner, but Edgerton delivers the subtlest of gestures and expressiveness to define him. Felicity Jones is wonderful as Gladys, but it is William H. Macy and Kerry Condon who deliver the film’s definitive supporting performances.
As Arn, Macy is in equal parts curmudgeonly and pedantic, a talkative old man whose prattle actually means something. He is absolutely perfect in this role.
As Claire, Condon delivers a determined woman with an unwavering sense of wonder and awe whose strength is matched only by her—like Arn’s—wisdom.
Train Dreams is an excellent film. It reveals itself—and its intention—slowly and deliberately as it draws us into one man’s life, a life like any other, full of bewilderment, beauty, love, and heartbreak. It is a masterpiece.