Those looking up Train Dreams on IMDB will note Clifton Collins Jr. listed as one of the main three actors. It’ll be a surprise, then, to watch Clint Bentley’s film and see Collins appearing on screen for all of 15 seconds. He’s part of a flashback to when the main character, Robert Grainier, was a young boy, and came across a man, played by Collins, dying in the woods of the U.S. Pacific Northwest. The man’s only request was some water, which Robert gave him, poured from the man’s boot.
While this experience undoubtedly had an impact on Robert’s life that we are about to see unfold, it is not what you would think of as a leading performance from Collins. And while his placement fourth in the film’s on-screen credits may be due to union agreements, or an acknowledgement that there were scenes left on the cutting room floor, it serves as a perfect metaphor for the themes of this thoughtful film. We may cast certain people as our fellow travellers in life, but we don’t always end up walking alongside them, and may find ourselves next to the bit players, or very often, all alone. Even when Robert lands a line of work he thinks will finally incorporate him into a community, he feels more alone than ever.
We learn from the start through a narrator (Will Patton) that Robert (Joel Edgerton) is going spend 80 years on this earth, starting in the late 19th century and going through to men walking in space. So we don’t have to worry, from moment to moment, whether this logger is going to get crushed by a falling tree, or run over by one of the trains of the title. We do come to worry about Robert’s spiritual well-being, as he will wander this world encountering loss and death and moments when it seems difficult to persevere. More broadly, he will encounter change.
Robert spends long times away from his wife (Felicity Jones), his baby daughter and the homestead they built on the banks of a river, because that’s where he makes his money, mostly in the lumber industry, but also on odd jobs like building bridges and railroads. We’re introduced to all variety of salty characters with whom Robert rubs elbows on work sites. Perhaps because of the narrator, this can feel like the frontier version of Goodfellas. In a similar way, we should not get too attached to any of them – not because they might get whacked, but because the next falling tree might be their last. Or, less terminally, they may just walk out of Robert’s life as suddenly as they’ve walked in. Just to give a flavour of the people he meets in one context or another, they’re played by the likes of William H. Macy, Paul Schneider, John Diehl and Kerry Condon.
Underpinned by Bryce Dessner’s orchestral score, Train Dreams seems like it will share ambitions with one of Terence Malick’s poetic contemplations of the natural world and human beings’ place in it. With no offense intended to Malick, Train Dreams is a lot more than the sum of its beautiful cinematography and voiceover ruminations. A Malick movie can get lost in its own navel gazey technique, but Bentley’s adaptation of Denis Johnson’s novella, which Bentley co-wrote with Greg Kwedar, is more committed to presenting the deep melancholy of its protagonist’s existence. And in doing so, it suggests this could be the deep melancholy of anyone’s existence.
Early on in Train Dreams Robert is involved in the death of a Chinese rail worker, who is thrown off a bridge for unclear reasons, possibly just xenophobia. Robert tried to stop it more than he contributed to it, but he carries the guilt and sees the man materialise throughout the movie, looking at him calmly but with implied judgement. Robert believes a pall has been cast over his life and that death is now following him.
Train Dreams tells us there’s no need to find external explanations for life’s cruel fates. To be human is to meet with tragedy on a regular basis, and either to recover or not recover from it. It’s convenient to try to blame it on something, because the alternative is that life is unfair and that our behaviour has little ability to make it any less so. Even if we live the best life we know how, spreading kindness and understanding to the best of our ability, we will still be absent from the ones we love at the times they need us most, and time will slip away from us.
If these seem like banal observations, films like Train Dreams inspire in us a fresh perspective on the banal. There are really no new observations in movies, only new ways to make us think about the things we already know. If they’re as successful at this as Train Dreams is, they leave us in a profound state of wistful wondering.
It would be wise to wonder if Patton’s narration, however accomplished, is truly necessary, or more of a crutch. Goodfellas, after all, is one of the rare examples where narration certifiably enhances the final product.
What it does is allow Edgerton to give a compelling interior performance, comprised of glances and thousand-yard stares, rather than expository dialogue. This man came from a time when men swallowed their feelings, so the few times he gives voice to them, they are worth listening to. He can still only half express what he wants to say, perhaps because he’s not an educated man – but perhaps because this film has gained in its cumulative impact as it has gone, and we already feel deeply what he isn’t saying.
Train Dreams is currently streaming on Netflix.