Train Dreams

 Train Dreams  (2025, Clint Bentley) is an American art film.  It's solemn and gravid with beauty.  Here are three quotes from the memorable dialogue in the film:  "If the Lord was a redwood, would you try to cut him down?";"The world needs a hermit in the woods as much as it needs a preacher in a pulpit;" and "The forest is an intricate thing where you can't tell where one things ends and another thing begins."  This last description also characterizes the movie -- as the film progresses, it becomes ever more a collage of memories, epiphanies in the present moment, flashbacks, and fantasies so that, at one point, the protagonist confesses that he can't distinguish from reality.  The performances in the movie are wonderful in a predictable sort of way and the photography and staging is gorgeous -- all the shots seem to be made at the "magic hour"; the wilderness landscapes are suffused with the pinkish highlights and purple glow of twilight.  Many critics think this film is the best American picture of the year.  I'm not one of them.  Although the movie is appealing, it is all lazy, sloppy, and meretricious.  

Train Dreams involves a cipher, a man named Robert Grainier, who spends his life working as a logger and, then, living as reclusive hermit in the forest somewhere near Spokane, Washington.  The picture encompasses Grainier's entire life and ends with his peaceful death in 1968.  Living on the frontier, he survives to see it close.  Grainier is an orphan -- this is a convenience to the filmmakers because it's not necessary to give him any background, place him in any pioneer social milieu, or figure out a convincing socio-economic and family context for him.  We see him wandering around the woods as a handsome young man.  There's an extraordinary shot of people posing next to a giant fish plucked out of one of the swift rivers in the area.  The young man brings water to a fellow dying from an injury inflicted on him by some unknown assailant.  Grainier brings the water in his boot.  He finds himself working on a railway trestle over a deep gorge.  For some reason, several of the roustabouts seize a Chinese man and, although Robert tries to save the man (he gets incapacitated by a kick in the belly), the railroad workers hurl the man off the high trestle.  The movie counts on us being "woke" and interpreting the attack on the Chinese worker as evidence of brutal racism -- but like Robert Grainier's biography, there's no context supplied:  for all we know the Chinese worker is being lynched for theft, or murder, or pedophilia.  For the first half of the movie, Robert is haunted by the impassive ghost of the Chinese worker and blames his misfortunes on that specter -- it's guilt that he suffers for not aiding the worker.  (In the second half of the movie, the filmmakers more or less abandon this motif and the ghostly Chinese man vanishes from the story.) In a startling prolepsis or flash-forward, we see Robert riding on a train crossing the high trestle sometime in the 1960's.  The voiceover (Will Patton who read the audio book of Denis Johnson's novella of the same name) tells us that the trestle on which so much labor was expended was replaced by a highway bridge and ended up obsolete.  This is another sign that the movie is striving for effects that it hasn't earned.  Obviously, the trestle is still in use since Robert is riding on the train crossing it on the way to Spokane.  The highway bridge serves a completely different function that the train trestle -- so, in fact, the rather portentous narrative is a kind of cheat.  I understand the lyrical effect that the film is laboring to achieve, but you can't strain for poetry by dissembling.  

After the lynching of the Chinese laborer, Grainier walks away from working on the railroad and becomes a lumberjack.  One day when he goes to Church -- this seems decidedly unusual for the laconic frontiersman -- he runs into a beautiful girl named Gladys.  She's bold and aggressive and initiates a relationship with him.  There's some poetic shots of them courting by a stream and, then, they are said to be married -- at least, in the eyes of Gladys and the Lord.  Gladys picks out a site for a log cabin which they build with their own hands -- the cabin is located within forty or so feet of a beautiful mountain river and the structure is built so the couple can look out on the stream from their bed.  (This is a memorable part of the movie involving the couple placing big stones to outline the future building with the rippling river nearby.)  Every summer and autumn, Robert goes to work at the dangerous lumber camps.  Trees fall on men and a snag called a "widow-maker" drops out of the crown of the forest and deals a mortal injury to a loquacious old man played by William Macy -- it's a Walter Brennan role and some people might applaud the snag for knocking the talkative oldtimer out of the movie.  There's a scene in which a righteous Black man invades the camp and guns down another loudmouth, a fundamentalist Christian who is always citing the Bible.  This is also a lazy scene that is irritatingly "woke" -- of course, the fundamentalist turns out to be a racist who shot the avenger's brother in Gallup, New Mexico merely "because of the color of his skin."  Of course, Christian fundamentalism here is equated with virulent racism -- this is a very lazy approach to the script and irritating.  There's tension between Grainier and his wife.  The couple now have a child, Katy, and Robert misses milestones in her childhood because he's away chopping down giant trees.  Robert tries to find work near his cabin in the woods, but can't locate anything that pays enough.  So he returns to his labor as a lumber-jack.  He and his wife plan to build a sawmill on the conveniently located river and, when he's earned enough to begin this project, he returns to his homestead.  But a horrific forest fire is under way and, when Robert reaches the site of the cabin, it has been burned to silvery ashes and there's no sign of either Gladys or Kate, the little girl.  (The film seems heavily influenced by Terence Malick's Days of Heaven and there are a number of similarities, most notably the voice-over narration and the spectacular fire scenes.)  Overcome by grief, Robert goes back to the woodcutting business, but, when he sees, one of his old cronies disabled by what may be Alzheimer's disease, he decides he want to avoid that fate and returns to the ruined cabin.  He sleeps in the ashes in the rain.  A friendly Indian who runs a general store in town assists him and the two men kill a big buck with enormous antlers -- in this part of the movie everything that happens triggers a reprise of something occurring during the idyll with Gladys:  so when the Indian aims and fires his rifle, for instance, we see a flashback to Gladys firing her rifle at a deer.  Robert rebuilds the cabin.  Times change.  He meets a spunky former nurse whose husband died -- probably as a result of being gassed in World War I.  The movie implies a romance might blossom between Robert and the young woman who is forest ranger assigned a fire-watch on the mountain. But nothing happens and she vanishes from the movie.  Robert sometimes goes into Spokane to walk around and attends a freak show there -- the "monster" is just a boy in a costume.  In one puzzling scene, a girl with a broken leg appears at the cabin in the woods and Robert, who may be hallucinating, thinks she is his lost daughter, Katy.  In the morning, she's mysteriously gone and Robert doesn't know whether she was real or a fantasy generated by his grief.  At a county fair, Robert takes a ride in an airplane and gets a vantage not only on the great woods, but also on the shape of his life. On a TV in Spokane, he sees John Glenn riding in his space capsule.  He dies in his sleep and the last shot of movie is his corpse in the cabin more or less indistinguishable from the lush moss and vegetation sprouting out of his body.  

This is all poetic and gorgeously filmed.  But falsehoods accumulate.  Grainier acquires a pregnant stray dog and this allows the film to luxuriate in shots of puppies playing with the hero.  But when Grainier has to spend the season at the lumber camp, he just leaves the dogs to their own devices.  (Later, when he returns, the dogs greet him happily -- who was watching them when he was chopping down trees?)  The most grievous instance of this sloppy screenwriting is the river rippling away merrily right in front of the cabin.  In the last forty minutes of the film, we see the cabin repeatedly, but there's no sign of the river.  When Grainier staggers out to the cabin in the fire-storm, the river has mysteriously vanished.  What has happened?  Someone has figured out that Gladys and Katy could have survived the fire if they had gone to the river and stood in it.  There is not much brush around the cabin and surely it would have been an easy thing to escape the flames by hiding in the river only a few feet from the cabin's door.  But the plot requires us to believe that Gladys and Katy were burned alive in the forest fire and, even, shows us Gladys collapsing in the fiery woods with little Katy loyally standing next to her body. (This is likely a morbid fantasy experienced by Grainier.) To avoid the problem of Katy and Gladys being spared death by seeking out the river, the stream simply vanishes from the movie -- it has moved and is not where it was during the showy scenes in which Gladys and Robert lay out their dream house. This is a cheat.  When Robert goes for the ride with a daredevil pilot in a biplane, the aircraft dives and climbs steeply over the woods and does barrel-rolls.  I have been in small planes of this kind and the fact that Robert seems to enjoy the flight rather impassively is another cheat -- certainly, a pioneer like Robert who marvels at the height of fire ranger tower would spend the entire flight puking up his guts and terrified out of his mind.  These may seem trivial  cavils but they are illustrative of the sloppy way in which the movie is constructed and the fact that it aims for implausibly lyrical effects not really justified by the circumstances.   The movie wants to dazzle you with its beauty and hopes that you won't really pay much attention of the factual elements of the story.  (I read a summary Denis Johnson's novella Train Dreams and observe that the book does not contain the "cheats" that troubled me when I watched this movie on Netflix).  

The movie is so "woke' and virtuous that I expected a final title to say that "no trees were harmed during the making of the movie".  But there was nothing of the kind.