So much can go wrong in life. Big things. Little things. Depending on your station in life what goes wrong determines so much of what comes after, it often tears at hope in our search for a peaceful existence. Train Dreams, directed and co-written by Clint Bentley, set in a more challenging era than our own, focuses on the big things and little things that shape us, in a revealing and poetic story of the life of one man.
In its small singular focus the film expansively embraces the life of an Idaho man who has never traveled far from home, through tough times, tragedies and the moments that define a life in the way trees populate a forest. If that sounds depressing, it’s the exact opposite. The cinematography by Adolpho Veloso and the acting take flight and lift the story far beyond the gritty and tangled undergrowth of the life it inhabits.
It’s a gorgeous film to watch that beautifully captures the mountainous northwest as it follows this lumberjack plying his trade, clearing trees to make lumber for the construction of the Spokane International Railway. It’s a dangerous life and one that takes him away for stretches of time from the family he eventually builds. The mostly peaceful vistas and views contrast with the travails seemingly necessary for this man to build a simple life, at times as sharply shocking as a gunshot in a quiet wilderness. Yet we’re reminded that all of that work literally is overtaken as the years go by with new growth replacing old.
The cast is superb. Joel Edgerton plays the lead, Robert Grainer, in a brilliant performance proving less is always more. Felicity Jones plays his wife, breathing life into him and the story. William H. Macy is exquisite as an older logger in the camps dispensing well worn wisdom. Much of the story is accompanied by the best use of narration I’ve heard in a movie, voiced by Will Patton. It comes and goes like a breeze through the trees seemingly perfectly natural and undisturbing each time it wafts in.
This movie is not going to be for everyone simply because its success requires participation in an almost passive vein. It doesn’t propel us into story telling, it lays it out for us to observe like viewing a valley unfolding beneath from a mountain perch. It’s not fast paced. It’s revelations come in a visual poetry that astounds, capturing the complexity of nature and how simple our small part of it really is, no matter how large or important we view the roles we play in the dramas we create for ourselves.
In the insanely paced tumultuous times we now find ourselves it offers a moment of exquisite reflection exemplified by two mirroring lines of dialogue. “The world is intricately stitched together, boys. Every thread we pull, we know not how it affects the design of things,” says Macy’s character around a campfire. That echoes back again towards the end, when a Forest Service worker reminds Grainer and us that “every least thing’s important.”
Both challenge the wisdom behind the cliché that tells us we can’t see the forest for the trees. But then the bigger picture of a life is always made of smaller moments stitched together if we pay attention.
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Ryan Coogler knows how to tell stories. He knows how to tell stories in big ways. He knows how to tell stories that entertain and unsettle. He knows how to weave the various strands of history, culture, and popular story tropes together in ways that spin out a fresh new cinematic delight that redefines the old and refreshes the tired. He may get a bit carried away here and there, but in the end he delivers as a filmmaker of note.
Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3 