Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Clint Bentley
Starring: Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones, William H. Macy, Nathaniel Arcand, Clifton Collins Jr., John Diehl, Paul Schneider, Kerry Condon
A thinking person's Forrest Gump, this adaptation of a Denis Johnson novella is centred on an unremarkable man who just happened to live through remarkable times. Unlike the aforementioned Tom Hanks vehicle, the cultural and societal progress of 20th century America plays out offscreen here. Train Dreams' protagonist is oblivious to it all. He could have been born two centuries earlier and his life wouldn't have been much different.
We meet Robert Grainger (Joel Edgerton) in 1917. He's a quiet, unassuming fellow who is so shy he only ends up with a wife because Gladys (Felicity Jones) has the temerity to defy social conventions of the time and make the first move. The couple build a cabin on the outskirts of a small town in the Pacific NorthWest and give birth to a daughter. But work is hard to come by in the area and so Robert disappears for months at a time as he works on logging crews, felling the giant trees that blanket the area's landscape.
Robert's experiences in this work both scar and enlighten him. After witnessing the horrific murder of a Chinese railroad worker, Robert is haunted by the image of the victim, wracked with guilt that he didn't save him. A lunch break is interrupted by an African-American stranger who guns down one of Robert's colleagues, claiming to avenge the racist murder of his brother. Men are crushed by collapsing trees. A few words are spoken and the work goes on.
But Robert also learns about beauty on these excursions. He is mentored by Arn Peeples (William H. Macy), an elderly explosives expert with an ironic line in bucolic sermonising. Peeples helps Robert to appreciate nature, to take in the true splendour of his magnificent workplace. He mourns that his job requires him to destroy trees that have stood for centuries before men and machines arrived, but this film being shot in the very same forests, still standing proud, is a tribute to nature's resilience.
Edgerton is an actor who often feels miscast in lead roles. You might say he's a character actor cursed by handsome features. Robert Grainger is a perfect vessel for his distinctive talents. Edgerton's sad eyes communicate the pain Robert later feels following an awful personal tragedy, and his rarely seen smile lights up the screen. He possesses a face made to express wonder. When Robert listens to men more educated than himself, Edgerton's face is able to let us know that he doesn't really understand them, but their words affect him nonetheless. He's the illiterate churchgoer who can't read their Bible, but clutches it tightly because he likes how the preacher makes its words sound. His temple is a forest, or the porch of his cabin, or the arms of his wife. In these places he is in tune with the turning of the earth.
A folksy voiceover is delivered by the distinctive drawl of Will Patton. It's not quite a narration, and it could easily be dispensed with, but it's the best type of voiceover, one that adds to the film's mood rather than lazily telling the story. Patton's voice is used here the way most movies use a score. It sets the film's easy tempo.
The influence of Terrence Malick is unsurprisingly obvious in how director Clint Bentley and cinematographer Adolpho Veloso capture nature and faces. Veloso's camera is often still, and Bentley allows some scenes to play out in distant wide shots, its humans resembling toy solders in an overgrown back yard as the forests and hills dwarf them. This reminds us of how we're simply part of a greater eco-system, and the the depth of the 4:3 aspect ratio often causes us to look past the characters into the woods behind them. Dreamy Malickian floaty shots are reserved for Robert's favourite memories. When we cut to a rare close-up it means someone has something important to say. The brilliance of Bentley's film is that they don't always say it, but we can guess the words stuck in their throats because they're trapped in ours. This is a film about a man who can't find the right words, made by a filmmaker with all the right pictures.
Train Dreams is on Netflix from November 21st.
