Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on gigantic television.
At this point, I think the Best Picture race is pretty much limited to One Battle After Another and Sinners with an outside chance of Marty Supreme. Honestly, even Sinners feels like an outsider at this point, with oddsmakers giving OBAA a better-than 60% chance. Train Dreams has virtually no chance of winning, and that has essentially been the case from the moment the nominations dropped. It doesn’t have much of a chance, but I am pleased that it was nominated. Oscar should go out of its way to nominate films like Train Dreams more often, if only to call out more attention to them.
Train Dreams is not the kind of movie that is normally going to get a great deal of attention from the average movie watcher. It is slow to a fault. Not a great deal happens in it. Even the massive forest fire, something that could easily become something like an action sequence is slow. I don’t have a problem with this, but I imagine that some people will.
This is the story of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), a man who made his living as a logger, and what he goes through in his life. It is perhaps the most existential film I have seen in ages. Grainer shows up in Idaho in the late 19th century on a train, an orphan. His early life is uneventful and he eventually drops out of school for a bit and lives a fairly listless life until he encounters Gladys (Felicity Jones). The two are soon inseparable, and they build a house out in the forest and have a daughter they name Kate.
Robert and Gladys are inseparable, except that they are frequently separated because of his work. His time logging takes him away from the family’s small cabin and acre of land. He saves up his money as best he can, deals with the dangers of the job, and dreams of returning home to his wife and daughter. His time in the forest is spent making connections with other men and experiencing the oddities o life, like a man who is hunted down by a vigilante. Men are killed in the dangerous work, and buried in the forest, their boots nailed to trees to demonstrate that they were there. Many of these men leave a lasting impression on him, none more than Arn Peeples (William H. Macy), who is something of a philosopher, but is mortally wounded by a falling branch.
His goal, and the goal of Gladys, is to build a sawmill that would allow him to stay home. He spends one more year in the forest, but comes home to a terrible forest fire, and both Gladys and Kate missing. Now lost again, he finds that the world of logging is passing him by as well—new technology like chainsaws are beyond his ability to understand.
The word that best describes Train Dreams is “contemplative.” Robert Grainier is a man of few words, so a film following him is going to have a lot of long, slow silences. But make no mistake—these silences are important. Robert’s world is the trees and the land, and while there are people that are a part of it, too, it’s soon clear that he doesn’t feel much at home in the world populated by other people. Robert’s world is simple, or his desired world is simple, and his reality is far more than he ever wanted it to be in complexity.
I say that this is an existential film because in large part, the point of this film is finding the meaning of Robert Grainier’s life. This is a task put both to him and to us in the audience. His wife and daughter disappear and he never remarries, never sires an heir. What, then, does his life mean to anyone else? Does it mean anything to him? And while we can probably agree that there is some value in his life, the question of what that value is needs to be asked. If the world has passed him by and he more or less leaves the society of people, living instead on his acre of land in the wilds of Idaho, does his life still have any meaning in the wider world, or just to himself?
It’s a good question. The truth is that this is the sort of story that cinema can do really well. Big explosions and gun battles and flight sequences are a lot of fun, but they’re candy and spun sugar. Train Dreams is a film that is truly gorgeous to look at. It’s lush and beautiful, and the slowness of the story and the people is part of what gives it that beauty.
These are the kinds of films that Oscar should nominate for things. We know it’s not going to win. It doesn’t have a hope of winning. But the nomination calls attention to it, and it’s a clear demonstration of what cinema can be. In a world of sequels and splatter and car chases, Train Dreams shows us that the world is still beautiful and that simple stories still have their place.
Why to watch Train Dreams: It’s beautiful.
Why not to watch: It’s slow.
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