Train Dreams: The Living of These Days

From the fears that long have bound us

Free our hearts to faith and praise

Grant us wisdom, grant us courage

For the living of these days

For the living of these days

• Rev. Harry E. Fosdick

I often marvel at the amount of change that happens in the world in just five years. At my own personal change (mostly physically, some mentally) in just a few months. All this change amidst working, a false sense of striving (a writer who doesn’t write), and waiting. Waiting for what exactly, I don’t know. Something to happen, something that makes me conscious of my own change in the moment rather than realizing later how much I’ve changed. But I am always amazed, in moments, by how much the world has changed and how much it’s stayed the same. And lately, it seems that all that the good of the world has hardly moved, or is possibly receding, while the bad is not growing, but evolving from what’s always been there into something quite foreseen by many yet still shocking to witness, still unprecedented to all. Though this is how a lot of people throughout the course of history have felt. Including the protagonist of Train Dreams, a Netflix release by the Dallas based director Clint Bentley (I caught it in theaters on 35mm). Robert Grainier (a deeply wounded and gentle Joel Edgerton in a role made for him) is a working-class, uneducated man in early, and ever changing, 20th-century America. Adopted as an orphan kid and growing up in a small Idaho town, he doesn’t think much, only goes about his days finding work to earn a living. On a visit to church one day, he meets Gladys (Felicity Jones) and as Will Patton quips in graceful narration, “He suddenly found himself going to church every Sunday.”

The couple fall in love, build a cabin by a river in the woods and start a family. This is the one event of Robert’s life that not only matters, but is the one thing he can understand. And the beauty of Train Dreams (adapted from a 2011 novella by Denis Johnson) is the simple truth of knowing that’s all that needs to be understood. Despite this, things inexplicably happen around Robert, cruel and violent things. As a child he witnessed Chinese immigrants getting detained for deportation, “Grainier was baffled by the casualness of the violence,” states the narrator. While working as a railworker, a Chinese man with whom he came to have a friendly, if passive, relationship with, is thrown off the railroad bridge by a group of men. Robert is startled, wondering aloud what the man has done, yet doesn’t prevent the murder. This, and visions of the Chinese man, haunt him. He leaves the railroad work to cut down trees as a logger for the war effort, leaving Gladys and their daughter at the cabin for months at a time. During one of these stints, an armed Black man comes upon Robert and his fellow loggers and sawyers, inquiring about a man. That man, a gregarious Bible-quoter, attempts to run and is shot in the back. The Black man announces his murder as one of vengeance, for this man had murdered his brother because of the color of his skin. Robert and the men stay quiet, leaving him unchallenged and free to move on.

Robert begins to wonder when something will directly affect him. Eventually, something does. A forest fire ravages the landscape and his life. A symbol of life’s destruction and its gradual regeneration. I’ll resist giving anymore away here, though the film, to its credit, lacks a straight and linear plot. It’s Robert’s ordinary life, what he sees, how he works and how he loves his wife and daughter. Shot digitally, the film is a beautiful period piece, saturated in the feeling of its time span, roughly 1900s - 1960s, even with the majority of its setting in the natural world - the tall trees of Washington dwarfing the men, the river refracting sunlight onto Robert’s adorable baby girl, and the interior of the cabin shimmering in warm firelight.

Everything changes. You can make

A fresh start with your final breath.

But what has happened has happened. And the water

You once poured into the wine cannot be

Drained off again.

What has happened has happened. The water

You once poured into the wine cannot be

Drained off again, but

Everything changes. You can make

A fresh start with your final breath.

• Bertolt Brecht

Lots of comparisons to Terrence Malick are noted (I also thought of Jean Renoir’s The Southerner, even Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows), though this also works as a sort of inverse to one particular Malick film, A Hidden Life. This, too, is the story of a hidden life. But where Malick’s film is about one unknown man’s quietly faithful resistance to barbarity and oppression, Train Dreams is the story of the unknown common man. There is no rebellion in Robert, he’s a simple man of passivity (at first), suffering and grief, with a few adjustments and adaptation amidst great change, and eventually in old age, wonder and amazement. Though he does occasionally contemplate his life in his younger days, “Do you think that the bad things we do follow us in life?” he asks a wizened, lazy old man (William H. Macy stealing his moments breathlessly) working the dynamite for the logging crew. Robert listens by the campfire as that same man cerebrates about the work they do, “The world is intricately stitched together. Every thread we pull, we know not how it affects the design of things. Cutting down trees maligns the man’s soul, whether he’s conscious of it or not.” To which another man responds with clear cut capitalist values, “I got $200 in my pocket, my soul is fine.”

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, races, mosques, armies, flags, nations in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. 

• James Baldwin

These lines particularly struck me when thinking about two great shots in the film. A shot of a long tree branch from below (the camera is strapped to the tree), we hear sawing and then the cracking of the branch and we fall with the tree as it crashes to the ground, natural light lingering on the dust kicked up by its tragic landing. Later in the film, this shot is seemingly paralleled yet reversed with the point-of-view of someone rising out of bed. How many trees have been felled throughout the course of human history? How many lives, like Robert’s, come and gone without a trace? And what is the significance of these occurrences? So unfathomable as to be forgotten, but not so forgotten as to not matter.

I thank Clint Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar (they co-write last year’s stunning Sing Sing, Kwedar directed) for challenging my belief that cinema is not a window into the past. Because as much as I, a film history obsessive, long for cinema to be a window into a better past, I know that it is not. Dreams of reality, not actual reality. “The most beautiful fraud in the world,” as Godard put it. In fact, the films that I prefer to watch are all within Robert’s lifespan. And most of these films people went to see to escape the chaos and rapid growth (or economic depression) of their own time. But the ones that challenged then are the ones that stick with us today. And Train Dreams, a picture that should stick with us beyond the Netflix algorithm, challenged my notion about what cinema usually is. Of course, everything can be recorded and written down, but moving images can show and reveal the life of a regular guy, past or present. Projected light shining on the prosaic.

“The world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit,” a character says near the end of Train Dreams. “It’s beautiful,” another ailing character announces, looking out at the hills of trees. “What is?” Robert asks. “All of it,” he replies. “Every bit of it.” In another scene a bear happens upon Robert as he sits in smoldering terrain. We have to treat the world better. Because it’s all connected and it’s all beautiful. The trees, the mountains, art, animals, us. And the love in between it all, the reason for living, should not be a singular love for known things, but a universal one for all things, known and unknown.

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do. A lifetime is not long enough. Nor youth to old age long enough. Immortality and permanence be damned. Sure I want them, but they are nonexistent, and won’t matter when I rot underground. All I want to say is this: I made the best of a mediocre job. It was a good fight while it lasted. And so life goes.

• Sylvia Plath

Twilight in the Wilderness, 1860, Frederic Edwin Church