One Big Soul

So what if Train Dreams is Malick for Dummies? I’m a dummy and I liked it.

[Still working on those Academy Award nominated movies. So far I’ve done Best Picture nominees Marty Supreme, Frankenstein, Sinners, One Battle After Another, Bugonia, and Sentimental Value, and other-award nominees Blue Moon and Avatar: Fire and Ash. Follow along with me through Oscar night, March 15— movies are magic!]

I see several people have compared Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams with the work of Terrence Malick, sometimes unflatteringly. I have to be honest with you: Though, as a teenager, I was so enamored of Malick’s style I saw Badlands five or six times, after The New World I got off the bus. I’ve sometimes intended to hop back on, but over the years I developed what I’ll call a respectful aversion to movies that appear to demand patience without offering narrative drive (or other such cheap goodies, like laffs) in return. I was bound to see Train Dreams as part of my annual Oscar duty, but I confess I was relieved to learn it was less than two hours long.

For the first ten or fifteen minutes I was worried that would still be too long. Before my eyes adjusted to it, the photography looked a mite prettified for my taste — sun nimbus behind a pretty girl’s hair, filming a big tree as it falls from the tree itself, etc. I may have been influenced by the relatively happy path on which Robert Grainier, the main character, seemed at first to be set. Though shown in a short preface as a glum orphan, Grainier, grown into an itinerant logger for the railroads in Oregon, makes a rare visit to church and happens upon a beautiful woman who pursues him and, in short order, weds him and gives him a beautiful child.

As a boy Grainier had seen some ugliness, including the forcible removal of Chinese immigrants from his town and the dying breaths of a murdered hobo, and after years of hard and dangerous logging work had become taciturn and, the narrator tells us, without much “direction or purpose.” (The becalmed and slightly baffled performance of Joel Edgerton as Grainier supports this assertion.) But his love for Gladys and the child Kate makes him build a good home for them in the deep woods.

Work sends Grainier away regularly and, as we are conducted though his life, we witness many less happy incidents. These are shown without much dramatic urgency, though with clarity and vividness. (One violent encounter is shown in long shot and a long take; the twitching of one witness’ hand is about the tensest thing in it.)

These scenes are buffered by more reflective passages, including a few that Granier spends in conversation with the mystical dynamite expert Arn Peeples, played with canny restraint by William H. Macy. Arn sees a deeper beauty in the nature that surrounds them than most, and its fragility too — “This world is intricately stitched together, boys. Every thread we pull, we know not how it affects the design of things. We’re but children on this earth...” Arn is, until the end, the only person besides Gladys with whom Grainier can share even a few of his own feelings.

Flashbacks of earlier scenes start to cut in, sometimes much as we’d originally seen them, but sometimes refracted as dreams, or pieces of them: Blinking, flashing moments, or long fantasies on what has been or what Grainier imagines has been. After an incident at one job, in which a Chinese immigrant with whom he has become friendly is hauled away by several men and killed, the man starts showing up in Grainier’s dreams, quietly looking at him.

A turning point comes — and this is a spoiler, though given the nature of the film I don’t think knowing it would affect your experience of it too much — when Grainier returns to find a fire raging through his woods, his wife and children missing, their cabin gone. We find him trying everything to locate them, finally camping out and then rebuilding on the site of their demolished home (and partly living on morels, the mushrooms “which sprang up on ground disturbed by fire,” the narrator tells us) in case of their return. He starts hearing voices.

Because, as mentioned, Edgerton’s Grainier is not demonstrative, we barely notice at first that his trauma has sent him even deeper into himself than before. We may not notice, either, his struggle to come out of that dive until, in an extraordinary moment, he finds words for it.

Now the pretty picture-making, and the quietude and lack of drive, makes more sense; we realize (I did, anyway, at least I think so) that what we’ve been seeing are all dreams and memories — maybe Granier’s at the point of dying; maybe that of the oversoul at which Peeples’ dialogue hints. It could be that I imagine this because I, too, think we are all children on this earth, and our lessons hard won.

All the acting is wonderful, and Edgerton gets extra credit for resisting all temptation to play to the galleries. His aging and weathering makeup, done by Zoe Taylor, is unusually subtle and extraordinarily effective. The pretty pictures are by Adolpho Veloso. I liked Bryce Dessner’s score, and yeah, that’s subtle too — if you don’t want the snaffle and the curb, maybe this one isn’t for you. But even as a big fan of the grand gesture myself, I was happy for the break.