Train Dreams

17/10/2026

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A Hermit in the Woods

Adapted from Denis Johnson’s novella of the same name, Train Dreams spans decades in the life of a logger who, early on, loses his partner, Gladys (Felicity Jones), and their child in a fire. Yet while a fine film like Manchester by the Sea makes the tragedy a dramatic centrepiece, Train Dreams makes it almost incidental as drama, and yet vital to the film’s temporality. It becomes a permeating event in a film chiefly about time, about a man who grows up and grows old over forty years, and where time doesn’t so much pass him by as history happens adjacently. Near the film’s conclusion, he sees television images of an astronaut in outer space; it can seem as though anything outside his immediate environment of the northwest is outer space, and though he is a man who would have lived through two world wars, and numerous changes in the United States, the only events of any significance is the fire that killed his wife and child, and also the people he gets to know while logging, and who pass by or die off.

Yet Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) isn’t self-pitying or self-absorbed, oblivious or indifferent. He seems part of the earth, like lichen and bark, soil and grain, a man integrated into his locale while emotionally disintegrating after the death of his loved ones. Before they came along, he didn’t quite know what he was living for, or to whom he was attached, an orphan child who will become orphaned in reverse, the breadwinner supporting the family as he travels the region finding work, and misses out on the most important moment in his wife and child’s life: their death. When he returns to charred remains, with much of the forest burned down, he hopes they have escaped, and rebuilds the home (minus the bedroom, which is too painful to recreate), waiting for many years for their possible return. He hopes without much anticipation, and in time his grief becomes a form of contemplation, as if becoming an accidental monk, a person who might bring to mind Thomas Merton’s claim that ‘‘silence does not exist in our lives merely for its own sake. It is ordered to something else. Silence is the mother of speech. A lifetime of silence is ordered to an ultimate declaration, which can be put into words, a declaration of all we have lived for.’’ (Echoing Silence) Director Clint Bentley’s film brings life out of silence, while always respecting words (it has a voiceover spoken by Will Patton). Grainier is less taciturn than silent within speech, while many talk with the absence of silence, which means words must be constantly tumbling out of their mouth all the better to avoid the anxious hush that so threatens them. We notice this with a bible-basher who can’t keep his mouth shut, and only does so when a man who has been looking to avenge his brother’s death finally catches up with him, and Apostle Frank becomes a man of very few words indeed. Grainier sees the lack of words as space for other sounds, with language one of the things that can break silence, rather than the noise that should be paramount.

Grainier will not get over the loss of those he loved, though he perhaps manages to integrate them into the core of the self that he is, and this might best be reflected in the few scenes with a woman, Claire (Kerry Condon) who in another film would be central to his recovery, to making a new life for himself with a person he can love. In a detour from Johnson’s novella, she is in the area working on a survey, and he gives her a lift and meets her again. He discusses his loss; she discusses hers – that her husband passed away the year before. But their bond isn’t one of desire but of mutual grief, a solitude they both own and wouldn’t want to share and perhaps dilute.  She can help him understand his pain, but she isn’t there to alleviate it in a cohabited life, and Grainer continues to grieve, or recover, but does it alone.

If we insist the film is about time more than the tragedy of Grainier’s loss, any such claim accepts that the deaths are central to the film’s temporality. While this relationship with time is easy to explore in literature, representationally, it is difficult to do cinematically. This might rest on literature’s capacity to offer time abstractly, while cinema does it concretely.  Literature invokes things and film shows them: the difference between a phonetic system of signs and a literal system of objects. Such a claim might seem naive from a semiotic perspective, where film would also be viewed as a system of signs. But whatever nuanced and complex exploration is used to differentiate sign systems semiotically, we have in film, as long as it remains closely associated to the reality out of which it comes, a direct rather than indirect relationship with time. A fully digital system that creates actors out of ones and zeroes, conjured up out of advanced computer-generated imagery, will not have this problem. When Channel 4 used a synthetic host to present a news programme before revealing that this figure doesn’t exist humanly, it was a sign of the times indeed, and of our possible future. If and when this comes to pass, if cinema no longer uses living flesh recorded, but conflatory selves digitally conjured up, then film will have solved a problem while risking its ontological core. It no longer need worry about how to present certain problems of time because to age a digital non-being is quite different from ageing a living human being. There will be no external, organic self the filmmaker will try to alter: no stubborn flesh and blood that carries within their face and their movements a moment of existentially living time.

While the Grainier in Johnson’s novella can pass through the many years of the book as a creation of the alphabet, put together through nouns, verbs and adjectives, sentences, paragraphs and chapters, in the film Joel Edgerton plays Grainier (except for brief moments where a child actor plays Robert), and usually, when a film covers decades, it has two choices in covering the extended period of a person’s life: use various actors to depict a lifetime, or one actor who, with the aid of make-up, ages over the diegesis. In Little Big Man, the youthful Dustin Hoffman plays the titular character for much of his very long life (he dies at 121), but other actors play Jack Crabb as a boy and an adolescent. In Once Upon a Time in America, Robert De Niro plays Noodles as a youngish man and as an elderly one, but another actor plays him as a boy – wearing De Niro’s distinctive cheekbone mole.

In such instances, the film offers a potentially crammed self. Fictional film is already doubled – an actor playing a character. But what happens when it becomes trebled or quadrupled – when you have two or three or more actors playing the same character? We can try and ignore the fact or, as some filmmakers insist, acknowledge the uncanniness of the effect. One of the most intriguing examples is in Antonioni’s The Passenger: is the young woman we see in London the same character who befriends the protagonist later? The film makes no mention of this moment in London, so we don’t know, though we do know that it is the same actress: Maria Schneider. A couple of years later, Schneider started filming That Obscure Object of Desire with Luis Bunuel, and when it didn’t work out, he cast two actresses in the one role, perhaps a reversal of Schneider playing what might be two roles in the earlier film. In I’m Not There, Todd Haynes casts six actors as Bob Dylan, illuminating different aspects of his character. One of the Dylans is played by Cate Blanchett.

The division of actor and character usually goes unacknowledged, even if often noticed, as readers of a novel adapted into a film will comment on how they imagined someone else in the role or, in miscasting more generally, where a viewer doesn’t believe in the actor playing a villain, a hero, a lover or whatever it might be. This cinematic divisiveness, this gap between character and actor, becomes especially exemplified in a film’s temporality because films are usually shot over a short period, or short enough for an actor, all things considered, to remain unchanged from the beginning of the shoot to the end. Imagine if Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy was filmed all at once, we would have the actors in their early twenties (as they are in the first film), also playing in their early thirties, and then early forties through to the third film. Linklater could have aged them, and the gap wouldn’t have been so huge that we’d have found it ridiculous. But it would have lacked the verisimilitude the project possesses, and the feeling in each film that we are ageing with them. It was a temporal notion Linklater extended with Boyhood (filmed over more than a decade as the actors aged in real time to match diegetic time), and in an ongoing project with Paul Mescal, Merrily We Roll Along, which will take 20 years to complete.

Director Clint Bentley chooses to use only one actor in the lead role, except for moments at the beginning with the boy actor, who is occasionally seen again in the film’s flashback reveries, and filmed it within a short period of  29 days. But perhaps one reason why this isn’t a problem as we see Edgerton ageing over the years, rests on the voiceover that runs through the film and that gives it some of the language of Johnson’s novella (Patton voiced the audio book), as Bentley finds a way to film time partly through using the language of print alongside the language of cinema. It also helps that Edgerton is an actor who can play older than his years, or a younger man whose times have been tough. He would have been fifty when he made the film, and middle-aged might be the best age to incorporate younger and older years without too much strain on the make-up department. The combination of an actor who can look older or younger within twenty years either way, and a voiceover that carries us through the years with a sense that this is a life illustrating time passing, rather than a dramatic narrative developing over a series of events, gives the film the quality of an existence dreamt rather than lived, as it isn’t only realist time that is shown, but also dream time.

It is as if Grainier’s solitude and grief generate an adjacent time, one that allows him to slip in and out of reverie, with the film bringing back his wife in a scene that often constitutes a cinematic cheat. Whether it is a character getting killed in a horror film only for us to discover they are still alive, or a late loved one brought back to life, it can seem manipulative because the film has located us so firmly in the dramatic. By giving the work the feel of an objective subjectivity, of a life recounted externally, but conveying Grainer’s thoughts and feelings, the film covers vast amounts of time and also moves between subjective and objective accounts of it.

Perhaps without the voice-over such a moment might seem too manipulative, with the viewer’s desire to see the wife so strong that they would share Robert’s need to see her presence as actual. Obviously, Bentley doesn’t film this as the sort of cheat in a horror film or thriller like A Nightmare on Elm Street or Blood Simple, as he contains it within a form that insists all the events aren’t so much products of Grainier’s imagination, but of his feelings. Yet these are feelings encompassed by a world far greater than his own existence. This is partly what we mean by the film’s subjective objectivity. Though the narrator tells us that Robert travelled through much of the northwest, he never saw the sea, suggesting a limited experience of the world. Bentley undeniably draws on Terrence Malick and Malick’s fascination with characters who exist more deeply within their own states than most people on film, and at the same time exist more embedded in the natural world than many a character. When a film uses a dream sequence, it wants to replicate the dramatic action to fool us into believing the sequence is actually taking place, only to show someone waking up as we realise it is a product of their imagination. It isn’t part of the logic of the film’s aesthetic, but an opportunity to fool the viewer into assuming it is diegetically real.

In this sense, Train Dreams feels like the diegetically irreal, as it incorporates the past, the present and the future, the projective, the fantastic and the oneiric, as all part of a jumbled mind trying to hold its centre, as a man finds a purpose to live. When Grainier talks with Claire, he says, ‘what if you have nothing else to give’, as though he is also saying he has nothing left to lose, and nothing to live for. This might seem like a proposition (could he find something to live for with Claire?) but functions as a proposition that is closer to a statement. It is an ontological question that links to nature, and that Claire tries to explain by talking about the interconnection between all things, and that ‘in the forest every least thing is important. It is all threaded together so you can’t tell where one thing ends and another begins…’’ This can seem like a platitude, but it comes from hard experience, as Claire’s husband will now be part of nature, eaten by insects, while the film recognises the oneness of things by registering the nature the characters exist within. It is also evident when an older figure speaks about the many trees he has cut down. Talking to a fellow logger about a third his age, Arn Peoples (William H. Macy) says cutting down trees that have been around for 500 years isn’t easy on the soul, whether loggers care to recognise it or not. The young man says, ‘‘I’ll have 200 dollars in my pocket by tomorrow morning; it don’t bother my soul.’’ Macy suggests he knows nothing of history. ‘‘This world is intricately stitched together, boys; every thread we pull we do not know how it affects the design of things. We’re but children on this earth, pulling bolts out of a Ferris wheel thinking ourselves to be Gods.’’ Later, when Grainier first meets Claire, she says all these forests around them “were once under 300 metres of ice...Can you imagine if you were back there then? This big block of ice, thousands of feet tall...It’s where all these myths come from, you know. All those flood stories...’’ If Robert has been plunged back into personal time, as his life seems a jumble of thoughts and feelings, the film shows he is also thrown into deep time, as we all are when thinking about how vast the system is that allows us to be born and live.

Claire invokes religions that have come out of this geological moment, and Edgerton says, ‘’One of the great things about the novella in general is that there’s this philosophical and spiritual religiousness around nature itself that’s separate from the classic religion of Christianity. It’s this idea that the bad things we do follow us around, and there’s a counterbalance to one’s guilt or complicity in a terrible act.’’(RogerEbert) If Claire and Arn are right that all things are interconnected, then the loss of his wife and daughter isn’t very different from a loss very early in the film, which haunts him for the rest of it almost as much as Gladys and Kate do. While working on building a railroad, some other workers grab a Chinese man he is sawing with, and drag him away before tossing him over a bridge to his death. Grainier sees this as an atrocious act, of course, but also an omen – as something that will in time be ill-luck visited upon him. The narrator doesn’t quite claim this is Grainier recognising guilt, but it does seem to come out at the very least as understanding: a notion that culpability is a broad church and no religious roof is big enough to contain it. If Arn worries about his soul, cutting down trees, Grainier worries about his after seeing a man thrown to his death. Grainier may have tried to intervene, or at the very least asked why they grabbed him, but all he knows is what he feels: this is a terrible act implicating him, even if he wasn’t at all responsible.

This is very different from another death that appears cold-blooded: the murder of Apostle Frank. There they are all sitting around taking a break from their work when a black man appears, enquires about someone called Sam, and when Frank gets up and runs away, he shoots him in the back. An awful moment of cowardice against an innocent man? It seems not. Frank/Sam killed his brother only for the colour of his skin, and he tells the others that if they want to avenge Frank/Sam, they should do it now. He doesn’t want to be watching his back for years, just as Frank/Sam had to watch his own. The others seem to accept the man’s justification; accepting his moral right, rather than out of a fear that they will be next. Grainier has no place for Apostle Frank in his dreams; even if, like the Chinese man, Frank was someone he was co-cutting wood with just before he died, this killing is deemed a correction of a wrong, not a creation of one.

In this sense, killing trees would be a greater crime than killing men, if the trees are responsible for giving us life without any culpability towards the world, while Apostle Frank is guilty of promulgating views so racist he will kill a man in cold blood as an instance of that belief. We might stretch a point and note that Frank uses up too much oxygen, while trees are central to giving it to us. Frank really can’t stop talking, and Grainier may well be half-relieved that a bullet finally silences him. Whatever Grainier’s feelings, Frank’s absence from his thoughts suggests that if cosmic forces are at work, Frank’s place in them is non-existent. The Chinese colleague’s place is central.

It is here the film’s ecology meets with its psychology, as Grainier lives in the world yet also in his head. But his head is full of the world, its mysteries and its vastness. When Edgerton says, " Words are there to confuse us in the world. There’s the things we say, what they actually mean, there’s so many layers to any conversation you have with any person. There’s something really interesting about people who don’t speak very much. There’s a mystery often to them’’ (LA Times), it reflects the film’s interest in words that must come from somewhere other than just people’s mouths. In the exchange between Arne and the young lumberjack, the younger man says, ‘‘there’s enough logs for us to cut for a thousand years. And when the last one is cut,  well, the first one will be growed up as big as anything round today.’ Arne responds by saying he thought the same thing as a young man. But whether age has bestowed wisdom on him, it would seem to have made him aware of vulnerability. The younger man’s words are all talk, yet some words come from silence, solitude and the world, and others from noise. There is no doubt that Apostle Frank’s jabbering comes from the latter, but also the young lumberjack’s. After Arne says that he thought exactly what the young man thinks when he was young, the lumberjack falls into pensive silence.

The film’s approach to language, solitude and ethics might resemble Merton when he says, ‘‘In reality, all men are solitary. Only most of them are averse to being alone, or to feeling alone, that they do everything they can to forget their solitude.” “How?’’, Merton asks. ‘‘Perhaps in large measure by what Pascal called ‘divertissement’ – diversion, systematic distraction. By those occupations and recreations, so mercilessly provided by society, which enables a man to avoid his own company for twenty-four hours a day.’’ (Echoing Silence) Let us be clear: Grainier likes company. When he is away from his wife and child, he only thinks of returning, and indeed he plans to give up logging to live with them permanently. The fire happens when he does one last trip to raise the extra funds he needs to build a sawmill back home.  If Claire says ‘‘the world needs a hermit in the woods as much as it needs a preacher in the pulpit,’’ this solitude has been forced upon him by tragic circumstances more than dispositional ones. Yet he absorbs this solitude; he doesn’t wish to escape from it, even if he also yearns in his dreams for others, and can hallucinate his family back into existence out of this yearning. Also, when he talks to Claire the second time, Robert instigates it: seeking her out at her high-perched home, atop a wooden structure.

Nevertheless, those divertissements Pascal invokes have mainly passed him by. When he goes to the large town of Spokane as a much older man, these diversions are anomalous: whether the astronaut he sees going into space on a television, a show at the theatre, or his face in a mirror, they all carry an oddness that suggests modern living has literally no meaning to him. When Grainier dies in November 1968, the narrator tells us he had never purchased a firearm or spoken into a telephone, as he explains how unworldly Grainier would seem to have been. There is irony here: he is someone who may have spent much of his early life cutting down trees, but would otherwise have had the smallest of carbon footprints. Now Pascal wouldn’t have been especially concerned with ecological questions when writing in the Pensees, ‘‘that if you take away their [people’s] diversion and they will be bored to extinction’’, we nevertheless might think of all the diversions that have been created that may contribute to our own extinction, as if in escaping from boredom we have hurtled towards our possible demise.

    It wouldn’t be fair to see the film chiefly through an ecological lens, but Bentley was aware the film would be read partly through one. ‘’Those wildfires, especially in Washington, Oregon, and Canada—they have what they call fire season. They have fires all the time. We’d gone out to start filming about six months before we actually filmed it. We got shut down by the strikes. But while we were out there, a wildfire popped up. It was very harrowing and scary. That is a part of people’s lives out there, that they have to deal with every year.‘’ (Decider) While Grainier would, in the early 20th century, be tearing down trees when the world had a voracious thirst for lumber, in the 21st, many of the trees are getting lost to fires that might bring to mind Arne’s comment about pulling bolts out of the Ferris wheel. From one perspective, Train Dreams is a tragic film about a man’s loss, but on another, it offers intimations of losses far greater still in the damage being done to the planet. When Robert and Claire discuss how everything has a part to play in the overall design, then what happens when one species is doing so much to alter it? If Claire can say that everything in the forest has importance, as she speaks about how it is all interconnected, then what surely matters is not imposing oneself on the environment. It is to accept a small, sustainable role within it. While Robert might suffer a personal tragedy and feel that he has contributed to a bigger one as a logger, much of his life afterwards would be based on the most minimal of footprints, no matter if the film concludes with Grainier going up in a small aircraft as he gets to see the world; fully understanding the idiom a bird’s-eye view.

Is Robert’s hermetic life a consequence of guilt and doing penance? In some ways it could be read as such, if we accept that Robert feels awfully responsible for the Chinaman’s death and terribly responsible for his wife and child’s. The second half of his existence may be very lonely, but it is also an exercise in damage limitation. When he says he took the railroad job and wished he hadn’t when he then witnesses the Chinese person’s demise, he would no doubt have wished he hadn’t taken that final logging job and left his wife and partner to the fire in his absence. And wouldn’t he also be more inclined to agree with Arne’s remarks over the young Minnesotan, and accept that the loggers are doing more damage than good? Yet this is finally a contingent retreat rather than an active pursuit. When Claire says the world needs a hermit in the woods, she might be referencing Thoreau’s Walden, but it’s unlikely this means much to Robert. As she says it, he semi-snorts, as though seeing it as nonsense, but perhaps at the same time happy that this is somebody’s diagnosis, and that it gives him a semblance of purpose.

However, if we do read him as an ecological hermit, however unlikely this would seem from Robert’s perspective, it gains justification in the aesthetic choices Bentley and his cinematographer Adolpho Veloso make. The film absorbs the tradition of ecological art house (Terrence Malick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Nicolas Roeg), a type of cinema that tends not to foreground the polemical or the political, but that nevertheless, in the way it shows nature, suggests an encapsulation of the human being within wider parameters than the readily narrational. Speaking of Tarkovsky, Veloso says, ‘‘I love how he portrays nature as something alive, almost like a character in its own right. That resonated with the way nature isolates Grainier in Train Dreams. We used a mix of headroom, tight framing, and wide shots to make Grainier feel either trapped or small within the vast landscape.’’ (Filmmaker Magazine) He also insisted most of the film was shot using natural light, as the film blends filmic influences with a determination to shoot the environment. Whether it is acknowledging the importance of Dorothea Lange’s Depression-era photographs, or adopting different shutter speeds so well-used in Wong Kar-Wai’s work to give scenes on occasion a woozy, dream-like, or an actively dream-oriented aspect, Veloso offers what may be increasingly important if film is to survive as a singular medium, as a form people might wish to see in the cinema, and see as cinema, no matter if it is a Netflix production, and where Edgerton has spent time addressing this question of streaming versus cinema. As Edgerton says, ‘‘my feelings are very mixed and they’re very much tailored to what the movie is — and therefore according to what the movie is and how big or small it is, where it should live. I’m all for pushing to fight for keeping cinema alive and I believe a younger generation feels the same thing. ’’ (LA Times)

This is the combination of the real out of which film comes, and the accumulation of possibilities it has offered in its one-hundred-and-thirty-year history. It is also the sort of film that can play big and small, as some so clearly work best on one size of screen or another. It is okay to watch many an American independent film of the last few years on the big screen, but works like Sword of Trust, Lady Bird, The Killing of Two Lovers, The Ride, or Fremont, play almost as well on the small one, while films like Moonlight, Aftersun, and The Florida Project are diminished on the smaller screen but aren’t lost on them. They aren’t like Barry Lyndon, Apocalypse Now, Days of Heaven, and The Sorcerer, where seeing the films on a small screen feels like you’ve bought a Van Gogh painting and instead find yourself with a postcard of it. Yet as long as filmmakers believe they are making cinema, even if the films might be viewed on small screens, then the visual ambition can still be there. The single-shot when the man comes after Apostle Frank assumes the viewer can access the various planes: the film doesn’t follow Frank as he runs away, nor his avenging angel as he goes after him. The camera stays aloof and expects us to observe the full scene as the various woodcutters sit around unsure how to act. It accepts an aspect of the real in the Bazinian sense: that one scans the frame for information, instead of assuming that every detail will be placed in front of our eyes. Andre Bazin might have respected realism in television as readily as in film, but it was a different type of realism in each instance. In TV, like radio, there was the importance of the live event, “a technology of reproduction and transmission.’’ (Bazin’s New Media) In cinema, the significance lay in perceptual freedom: ‘‘the camera cannot see everything at once, but it makes sure not to lose any part of what it chooses to see.’’ (What is Cinema?, Vol 1) This needn’t be an attack on montage, though Bazin’s purpose was to undermine its elevation in cinema’s earlier years; it is to insist that a film shouldn’t cut to a close-up because it is concerned that a viewer might not notice a detail if they aren’t watching it on the big screen. This risks becoming a small-screen sensibility. It is fine for filmmakers to acknowledge their films will play on television screens and laptops, but not to succumb to the expectation behind it.

However, Train Dreams’ chief and small contribution rests mainly on how it does time, even if indebted to the novella on which it is based. Yet as we have noted, to do certain things in fiction, like moving time along, needn’t be very difficult. But film’s stubborn presentness, its insistence on showing what is inevitably inferred in literature, can make covering many years in a life artificial and/or expensive. Artificial in that it requires using a mix of actors in one role, caking make-up on actors, or ageing and de-ageing techniques (The Irishman struggled here), and expensive, as it often demands period reenactment that doesn’t come cheap. Bentley solves the former problem partly by having the boy actor playing Robert in fixed-frame wordless scenes, with Bentley illustrating Robert’s young life instead of dramatising it. As for the cost in covering vast periods of time, Bentley solves this by showing us essentially that hermit in the woods. As the world passes him by, it doesn’t cost much money to reenact it.

When Oppenheimer and Barbie were such huge box office hits simultaneously, it looked like blockbusters were back and cinema was going to survive on the basis of them. Whatever the merits or otherwise of these two films, noise isn’t always the same as action, and it might be smaller works like Train Dreams that show cinema’s ability to renew itself, even if it accepts that many of its viewers will be watching the film on a smaller screen than the filmmakers might wish. Yet in its attention to detail and its melancholic, meditative tone, it asks us to pay attention, quite distinct from the ‘casual viewing’ Will Tavlin discusses when he speaks of ‘‘the  movies that go down best when you’re not paying attention.’’ (n+1) How one achieves that attention is the individual viewer’s concern. For some it will be a home entertainment system with a projector, for another a flat-screen TV, a third a laptop with headphones, a fourth a cinema experience. Yet whatever it is, the film ought to be made as if with the awareness that it hasn’t been directed with inattentive expectation, with the idea that it isn’t “another Netflix movie made to half-watch while doing laundry.’’  (n+1) Train Dreams may be a Netflix product, but one that escapes such low expectations.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Train Dreams

A Hermit in the Woods

Adapted from Denis Johnson’s novella of the same name, Train Dreams spans decades in the life of a logger who, early on, loses his partner, Gladys (Felicity Jones), and their child in a fire. Yet while a fine film like Manchester by the Sea makes the tragedy a dramatic centrepiece, Train Dreams makes it almost incidental as drama, and yet vital to the film’s temporality. It becomes a permeating event in a film chiefly about time, about a man who grows up and grows old over forty years, and where time doesn’t so much pass him by as history happens adjacently. Near the film’s conclusion, he sees television images of an astronaut in outer space; it can seem as though anything outside his immediate environment of the northwest is outer space, and though he is a man who would have lived through two world wars, and numerous changes in the United States, the only events of any significance is the fire that killed his wife and child, and also the people he gets to know while logging, and who pass by or die off.

Yet Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) isn’t self-pitying or self-absorbed, oblivious or indifferent. He seems part of the earth, like lichen and bark, soil and grain, a man integrated into his locale while emotionally disintegrating after the death of his loved ones. Before they came along, he didn’t quite know what he was living for, or to whom he was attached, an orphan child who will become orphaned in reverse, the breadwinner supporting the family as he travels the region finding work, and misses out on the most important moment in his wife and child’s life: their death. When he returns to charred remains, with much of the forest burned down, he hopes they have escaped, and rebuilds the home (minus the bedroom, which is too painful to recreate), waiting for many years for their possible return. He hopes without much anticipation, and in time his grief becomes a form of contemplation, as if becoming an accidental monk, a person who might bring to mind Thomas Merton’s claim that ‘‘silence does not exist in our lives merely for its own sake. It is ordered to something else. Silence is the mother of speech. A lifetime of silence is ordered to an ultimate declaration, which can be put into words, a declaration of all we have lived for.’’ (Echoing Silence) Director Clint Bentley’s film brings life out of silence, while always respecting words (it has a voiceover spoken by Will Patton). Grainier is less taciturn than silent within speech, while many talk with the absence of silence, which means words must be constantly tumbling out of their mouth all the better to avoid the anxious hush that so threatens them. We notice this with a bible-basher who can’t keep his mouth shut, and only does so when a man who has been looking to avenge his brother’s death finally catches up with him, and Apostle Frank becomes a man of very few words indeed. Grainier sees the lack of words as space for other sounds, with language one of the things that can break silence, rather than the noise that should be paramount.

Grainier will not get over the loss of those he loved, though he perhaps manages to integrate them into the core of the self that he is, and this might best be reflected in the few scenes with a woman, Claire (Kerry Condon) who in another film would be central to his recovery, to making a new life for himself with a person he can love. In a detour from Johnson’s novella, she is in the area working on a survey, and he gives her a lift and meets her again. He discusses his loss; she discusses hers – that her husband passed away the year before. But their bond isn’t one of desire but of mutual grief, a solitude they both own and wouldn’t want to share and perhaps dilute.  She can help him understand his pain, but she isn’t there to alleviate it in a cohabited life, and Grainer continues to grieve, or recover, but does it alone.

If we insist the film is about time more than the tragedy of Grainier’s loss, any such claim accepts that the deaths are central to the film’s temporality. While this relationship with time is easy to explore in literature, representationally, it is difficult to do cinematically. This might rest on literature’s capacity to offer time abstractly, while cinema does it concretely.  Literature invokes things and film shows them: the difference between a phonetic system of signs and a literal system of objects. Such a claim might seem naive from a semiotic perspective, where film would also be viewed as a system of signs. But whatever nuanced and complex exploration is used to differentiate sign systems semiotically, we have in film, as long as it remains closely associated to the reality out of which it comes, a direct rather than indirect relationship with time. A fully digital system that creates actors out of ones and zeroes, conjured up out of advanced computer-generated imagery, will not have this problem. When Channel 4 used a synthetic host to present a news programme before revealing that this figure doesn’t exist humanly, it was a sign of the times indeed, and of our possible future. If and when this comes to pass, if cinema no longer uses living flesh recorded, but conflatory selves digitally conjured up, then film will have solved a problem while risking its ontological core. It no longer need worry about how to present certain problems of time because to age a digital non-being is quite different from ageing a living human being. There will be no external, organic self the filmmaker will try to alter: no stubborn flesh and blood that carries within their face and their movements a moment of existentially living time.

While the Grainier in Johnson’s novella can pass through the many years of the book as a creation of the alphabet, put together through nouns, verbs and adjectives, sentences, paragraphs and chapters, in the film Joel Edgerton plays Grainier (except for brief moments where a child actor plays Robert), and usually, when a film covers decades, it has two choices in covering the extended period of a person’s life: use various actors to depict a lifetime, or one actor who, with the aid of make-up, ages over the diegesis. In Little Big Man, the youthful Dustin Hoffman plays the titular character for much of his very long life (he dies at 121), but other actors play Jack Crabb as a boy and an adolescent. In Once Upon a Time in America, Robert De Niro plays Noodles as a youngish man and as an elderly one, but another actor plays him as a boy – wearing De Niro’s distinctive cheekbone mole.

In such instances, the film offers a potentially crammed self. Fictional film is already doubled – an actor playing a character. But what happens when it becomes trebled or quadrupled – when you have two or three or more actors playing the same character? We can try and ignore the fact or, as some filmmakers insist, acknowledge the uncanniness of the effect. One of the most intriguing examples is in Antonioni’s The Passenger: is the young woman we see in London the same character who befriends the protagonist later? The film makes no mention of this moment in London, so we don’t know, though we do know that it is the same actress: Maria Schneider. A couple of years later, Schneider started filming That Obscure Object of Desire with Luis Bunuel, and when it didn’t work out, he cast two actresses in the one role, perhaps a reversal of Schneider playing what might be two roles in the earlier film. In I’m Not There, Todd Haynes casts six actors as Bob Dylan, illuminating different aspects of his character. One of the Dylans is played by Cate Blanchett.

The division of actor and character usually goes unacknowledged, even if often noticed, as readers of a novel adapted into a film will comment on how they imagined someone else in the role or, in miscasting more generally, where a viewer doesn’t believe in the actor playing a villain, a hero, a lover or whatever it might be. This cinematic divisiveness, this gap between character and actor, becomes especially exemplified in a film’s temporality because films are usually shot over a short period, or short enough for an actor, all things considered, to remain unchanged from the beginning of the shoot to the end. Imagine if Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy was filmed all at once, we would have the actors in their early twenties (as they are in the first film), also playing in their early thirties, and then early forties through to the third film. Linklater could have aged them, and the gap wouldn’t have been so huge that we’d have found it ridiculous. But it would have lacked the verisimilitude the project possesses, and the feeling in each film that we are ageing with them. It was a temporal notion Linklater extended with Boyhood (filmed over more than a decade as the actors aged in real time to match diegetic time), and in an ongoing project with Paul Mescal, Merrily We Roll Along, which will take 20 years to complete.

Director Clint Bentley chooses to use only one actor in the lead role, except for moments at the beginning with the boy actor, who is occasionally seen again in the film’s flashback reveries, and filmed it within a short period of  29 days. But perhaps one reason why this isn’t a problem as we see Edgerton ageing over the years, rests on the voiceover that runs through the film and that gives it some of the language of Johnson’s novella (Patton voiced the audio book), as Bentley finds a way to film time partly through using the language of print alongside the language of cinema. It also helps that Edgerton is an actor who can play older than his years, or a younger man whose times have been tough. He would have been fifty when he made the film, and middle-aged might be the best age to incorporate younger and older years without too much strain on the make-up department. The combination of an actor who can look older or younger within twenty years either way, and a voiceover that carries us through the years with a sense that this is a life illustrating time passing, rather than a dramatic narrative developing over a series of events, gives the film the quality of an existence dreamt rather than lived, as it isn’t only realist time that is shown, but also dream time.

It is as if Grainier’s solitude and grief generate an adjacent time, one that allows him to slip in and out of reverie, with the film bringing back his wife in a scene that often constitutes a cinematic cheat. Whether it is a character getting killed in a horror film only for us to discover they are still alive, or a late loved one brought back to life, it can seem manipulative because the film has located us so firmly in the dramatic. By giving the work the feel of an objective subjectivity, of a life recounted externally, but conveying Grainer’s thoughts and feelings, the film covers vast amounts of time and also moves between subjective and objective accounts of it.

Perhaps without the voice-over such a moment might seem too manipulative, with the viewer’s desire to see the wife so strong that they would share Robert’s need to see her presence as actual. Obviously, Bentley doesn’t film this as the sort of cheat in a horror film or thriller like A Nightmare on Elm Street or Blood Simple, as he contains it within a form that insists all the events aren’t so much products of Grainier’s imagination, but of his feelings. Yet these are feelings encompassed by a world far greater than his own existence. This is partly what we mean by the film’s subjective objectivity. Though the narrator tells us that Robert travelled through much of the northwest, he never saw the sea, suggesting a limited experience of the world. Bentley undeniably draws on Terrence Malick and Malick’s fascination with characters who exist more deeply within their own states than most people on film, and at the same time exist more embedded in the natural world than many a character. When a film uses a dream sequence, it wants to replicate the dramatic action to fool us into believing the sequence is actually taking place, only to show someone waking up as we realise it is a product of their imagination. It isn’t part of the logic of the film’s aesthetic, but an opportunity to fool the viewer into assuming it is diegetically real.

In this sense, Train Dreams feels like the diegetically irreal, as it incorporates the past, the present and the future, the projective, the fantastic and the oneiric, as all part of a jumbled mind trying to hold its centre, as a man finds a purpose to live. When Grainier talks with Claire, he says, ‘what if you have nothing else to give’, as though he is also saying he has nothing left to lose, and nothing to live for. This might seem like a proposition (could he find something to live for with Claire?) but functions as a proposition that is closer to a statement. It is an ontological question that links to nature, and that Claire tries to explain by talking about the interconnection between all things, and that ‘in the forest every least thing is important. It is all threaded together so you can’t tell where one thing ends and another begins…’’ This can seem like a platitude, but it comes from hard experience, as Claire’s husband will now be part of nature, eaten by insects, while the film recognises the oneness of things by registering the nature the characters exist within. It is also evident when an older figure speaks about the many trees he has cut down. Talking to a fellow logger about a third his age, Arn Peoples (William H. Macy) says cutting down trees that have been around for 500 years isn’t easy on the soul, whether loggers care to recognise it or not. The young man says, ‘‘I’ll have 200 dollars in my pocket by tomorrow morning; it don’t bother my soul.’’ Macy suggests he knows nothing of history. ‘‘This world is intricately stitched together, boys; every thread we pull we do not know how it affects the design of things. We’re but children on this earth, pulling bolts out of a Ferris wheel thinking ourselves to be Gods.’’ Later, when Grainier first meets Claire, she says all these forests around them “were once under 300 metres of ice...Can you imagine if you were back there then? This big block of ice, thousands of feet tall...It’s where all these myths come from, you know. All those flood stories...’’ If Robert has been plunged back into personal time, as his life seems a jumble of thoughts and feelings, the film shows he is also thrown into deep time, as we all are when thinking about how vast the system is that allows us to be born and live.

Claire invokes religions that have come out of this geological moment, and Edgerton says, ‘’One of the great things about the novella in general is that there’s this philosophical and spiritual religiousness around nature itself that’s separate from the classic religion of Christianity. It’s this idea that the bad things we do follow us around, and there’s a counterbalance to one’s guilt or complicity in a terrible act.’’(RogerEbert) If Claire and Arn are right that all things are interconnected, then the loss of his wife and daughter isn’t very different from a loss very early in the film, which haunts him for the rest of it almost as much as Gladys and Kate do. While working on building a railroad, some other workers grab a Chinese man he is sawing with, and drag him away before tossing him over a bridge to his death. Grainier sees this as an atrocious act, of course, but also an omen – as something that will in time be ill-luck visited upon him. The narrator doesn’t quite claim this is Grainier recognising guilt, but it does seem to come out at the very least as understanding: a notion that culpability is a broad church and no religious roof is big enough to contain it. If Arn worries about his soul, cutting down trees, Grainier worries about his after seeing a man thrown to his death. Grainier may have tried to intervene, or at the very least asked why they grabbed him, but all he knows is what he feels: this is a terrible act implicating him, even if he wasn’t at all responsible.

This is very different from another death that appears cold-blooded: the murder of Apostle Frank. There they are all sitting around taking a break from their work when a black man appears, enquires about someone called Sam, and when Frank gets up and runs away, he shoots him in the back. An awful moment of cowardice against an innocent man? It seems not. Frank/Sam killed his brother only for the colour of his skin, and he tells the others that if they want to avenge Frank/Sam, they should do it now. He doesn’t want to be watching his back for years, just as Frank/Sam had to watch his own. The others seem to accept the man’s justification; accepting his moral right, rather than out of a fear that they will be next. Grainier has no place for Apostle Frank in his dreams; even if, like the Chinese man, Frank was someone he was co-cutting wood with just before he died, this killing is deemed a correction of a wrong, not a creation of one.

In this sense, killing trees would be a greater crime than killing men, if the trees are responsible for giving us life without any culpability towards the world, while Apostle Frank is guilty of promulgating views so racist he will kill a man in cold blood as an instance of that belief. We might stretch a point and note that Frank uses up too much oxygen, while trees are central to giving it to us. Frank really can’t stop talking, and Grainier may well be half-relieved that a bullet finally silences him. Whatever Grainier’s feelings, Frank’s absence from his thoughts suggests that if cosmic forces are at work, Frank’s place in them is non-existent. The Chinese colleague’s place is central.

It is here the film’s ecology meets with its psychology, as Grainier lives in the world yet also in his head. But his head is full of the world, its mysteries and its vastness. When Edgerton says, " Words are there to confuse us in the world. There’s the things we say, what they actually mean, there’s so many layers to any conversation you have with any person. There’s something really interesting about people who don’t speak very much. There’s a mystery often to them’’ (LA Times), it reflects the film’s interest in words that must come from somewhere other than just people’s mouths. In the exchange between Arne and the young lumberjack, the younger man says, ‘‘there’s enough logs for us to cut for a thousand years. And when the last one is cut,  well, the first one will be growed up as big as anything round today.’ Arne responds by saying he thought the same thing as a young man. But whether age has bestowed wisdom on him, it would seem to have made him aware of vulnerability. The younger man’s words are all talk, yet some words come from silence, solitude and the world, and others from noise. There is no doubt that Apostle Frank’s jabbering comes from the latter, but also the young lumberjack’s. After Arne says that he thought exactly what the young man thinks when he was young, the lumberjack falls into pensive silence.

The film’s approach to language, solitude and ethics might resemble Merton when he says, ‘‘In reality, all men are solitary. Only most of them are averse to being alone, or to feeling alone, that they do everything they can to forget their solitude.” “How?’’, Merton asks. ‘‘Perhaps in large measure by what Pascal called ‘divertissement’ – diversion, systematic distraction. By those occupations and recreations, so mercilessly provided by society, which enables a man to avoid his own company for twenty-four hours a day.’’ (Echoing Silence) Let us be clear: Grainier likes company. When he is away from his wife and child, he only thinks of returning, and indeed he plans to give up logging to live with them permanently. The fire happens when he does one last trip to raise the extra funds he needs to build a sawmill back home.  If Claire says ‘‘the world needs a hermit in the woods as much as it needs a preacher in the pulpit,’’ this solitude has been forced upon him by tragic circumstances more than dispositional ones. Yet he absorbs this solitude; he doesn’t wish to escape from it, even if he also yearns in his dreams for others, and can hallucinate his family back into existence out of this yearning. Also, when he talks to Claire the second time, Robert instigates it: seeking her out at her high-perched home, atop a wooden structure.

Nevertheless, those divertissements Pascal invokes have mainly passed him by. When he goes to the large town of Spokane as a much older man, these diversions are anomalous: whether the astronaut he sees going into space on a television, a show at the theatre, or his face in a mirror, they all carry an oddness that suggests modern living has literally no meaning to him. When Grainier dies in November 1968, the narrator tells us he had never purchased a firearm or spoken into a telephone, as he explains how unworldly Grainier would seem to have been. There is irony here: he is someone who may have spent much of his early life cutting down trees, but would otherwise have had the smallest of carbon footprints. Now Pascal wouldn’t have been especially concerned with ecological questions when writing in the Pensees, ‘‘that if you take away their [people’s] diversion and they will be bored to extinction’’, we nevertheless might think of all the diversions that have been created that may contribute to our own extinction, as if in escaping from boredom we have hurtled towards our possible demise.

    It wouldn’t be fair to see the film chiefly through an ecological lens, but Bentley was aware the film would be read partly through one. ‘’Those wildfires, especially in Washington, Oregon, and Canada—they have what they call fire season. They have fires all the time. We’d gone out to start filming about six months before we actually filmed it. We got shut down by the strikes. But while we were out there, a wildfire popped up. It was very harrowing and scary. That is a part of people’s lives out there, that they have to deal with every year.‘’ (Decider) While Grainier would, in the early 20th century, be tearing down trees when the world had a voracious thirst for lumber, in the 21st, many of the trees are getting lost to fires that might bring to mind Arne’s comment about pulling bolts out of the Ferris wheel. From one perspective, Train Dreams is a tragic film about a man’s loss, but on another, it offers intimations of losses far greater still in the damage being done to the planet. When Robert and Claire discuss how everything has a part to play in the overall design, then what happens when one species is doing so much to alter it? If Claire can say that everything in the forest has importance, as she speaks about how it is all interconnected, then what surely matters is not imposing oneself on the environment. It is to accept a small, sustainable role within it. While Robert might suffer a personal tragedy and feel that he has contributed to a bigger one as a logger, much of his life afterwards would be based on the most minimal of footprints, no matter if the film concludes with Grainier going up in a small aircraft as he gets to see the world; fully understanding the idiom a bird’s-eye view.

Is Robert’s hermetic life a consequence of guilt and doing penance? In some ways it could be read as such, if we accept that Robert feels awfully responsible for the Chinaman’s death and terribly responsible for his wife and child’s. The second half of his existence may be very lonely, but it is also an exercise in damage limitation. When he says he took the railroad job and wished he hadn’t when he then witnesses the Chinese person’s demise, he would no doubt have wished he hadn’t taken that final logging job and left his wife and partner to the fire in his absence. And wouldn’t he also be more inclined to agree with Arne’s remarks over the young Minnesotan, and accept that the loggers are doing more damage than good? Yet this is finally a contingent retreat rather than an active pursuit. When Claire says the world needs a hermit in the woods, she might be referencing Thoreau’s Walden, but it’s unlikely this means much to Robert. As she says it, he semi-snorts, as though seeing it as nonsense, but perhaps at the same time happy that this is somebody’s diagnosis, and that it gives him a semblance of purpose.

However, if we do read him as an ecological hermit, however unlikely this would seem from Robert’s perspective, it gains justification in the aesthetic choices Bentley and his cinematographer Adolpho Veloso make. The film absorbs the tradition of ecological art house (Terrence Malick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Nicolas Roeg), a type of cinema that tends not to foreground the polemical or the political, but that nevertheless, in the way it shows nature, suggests an encapsulation of the human being within wider parameters than the readily narrational. Speaking of Tarkovsky, Veloso says, ‘‘I love how he portrays nature as something alive, almost like a character in its own right. That resonated with the way nature isolates Grainier in Train Dreams. We used a mix of headroom, tight framing, and wide shots to make Grainier feel either trapped or small within the vast landscape.’’ (Filmmaker Magazine) He also insisted most of the film was shot using natural light, as the film blends filmic influences with a determination to shoot the environment. Whether it is acknowledging the importance of Dorothea Lange’s Depression-era photographs, or adopting different shutter speeds so well-used in Wong Kar-Wai’s work to give scenes on occasion a woozy, dream-like, or an actively dream-oriented aspect, Veloso offers what may be increasingly important if film is to survive as a singular medium, as a form people might wish to see in the cinema, and see as cinema, no matter if it is a Netflix production, and where Edgerton has spent time addressing this question of streaming versus cinema. As Edgerton says, ‘‘my feelings are very mixed and they’re very much tailored to what the movie is — and therefore according to what the movie is and how big or small it is, where it should live. I’m all for pushing to fight for keeping cinema alive and I believe a younger generation feels the same thing. ’’ (LA Times)

This is the combination of the real out of which film comes, and the accumulation of possibilities it has offered in its one-hundred-and-thirty-year history. It is also the sort of film that can play big and small, as some so clearly work best on one size of screen or another. It is okay to watch many an American independent film of the last few years on the big screen, but works like Sword of Trust, Lady Bird, The Killing of Two Lovers, The Ride, or Fremont, play almost as well on the small one, while films like Moonlight, Aftersun, and The Florida Project are diminished on the smaller screen but aren’t lost on them. They aren’t like Barry Lyndon, Apocalypse Now, Days of Heaven, and The Sorcerer, where seeing the films on a small screen feels like you’ve bought a Van Gogh painting and instead find yourself with a postcard of it. Yet as long as filmmakers believe they are making cinema, even if the films might be viewed on small screens, then the visual ambition can still be there. The single-shot when the man comes after Apostle Frank assumes the viewer can access the various planes: the film doesn’t follow Frank as he runs away, nor his avenging angel as he goes after him. The camera stays aloof and expects us to observe the full scene as the various woodcutters sit around unsure how to act. It accepts an aspect of the real in the Bazinian sense: that one scans the frame for information, instead of assuming that every detail will be placed in front of our eyes. Andre Bazin might have respected realism in television as readily as in film, but it was a different type of realism in each instance. In TV, like radio, there was the importance of the live event, “a technology of reproduction and transmission.’’ (Bazin’s New Media) In cinema, the significance lay in perceptual freedom: ‘‘the camera cannot see everything at once, but it makes sure not to lose any part of what it chooses to see.’’ (What is Cinema?, Vol 1) This needn’t be an attack on montage, though Bazin’s purpose was to undermine its elevation in cinema’s earlier years; it is to insist that a film shouldn’t cut to a close-up because it is concerned that a viewer might not notice a detail if they aren’t watching it on the big screen. This risks becoming a small-screen sensibility. It is fine for filmmakers to acknowledge their films will play on television screens and laptops, but not to succumb to the expectation behind it.

However, Train Dreams’ chief and small contribution rests mainly on how it does time, even if indebted to the novella on which it is based. Yet as we have noted, to do certain things in fiction, like moving time along, needn’t be very difficult. But film’s stubborn presentness, its insistence on showing what is inevitably inferred in literature, can make covering many years in a life artificial and/or expensive. Artificial in that it requires using a mix of actors in one role, caking make-up on actors, or ageing and de-ageing techniques (The Irishman struggled here), and expensive, as it often demands period reenactment that doesn’t come cheap. Bentley solves the former problem partly by having the boy actor playing Robert in fixed-frame wordless scenes, with Bentley illustrating Robert’s young life instead of dramatising it. As for the cost in covering vast periods of time, Bentley solves this by showing us essentially that hermit in the woods. As the world passes him by, it doesn’t cost much money to reenact it.

When Oppenheimer and Barbie were such huge box office hits simultaneously, it looked like blockbusters were back and cinema was going to survive on the basis of them. Whatever the merits or otherwise of these two films, noise isn’t always the same as action, and it might be smaller works like Train Dreams that show cinema’s ability to renew itself, even if it accepts that many of its viewers will be watching the film on a smaller screen than the filmmakers might wish. Yet in its attention to detail and its melancholic, meditative tone, it asks us to pay attention, quite distinct from the ‘casual viewing’ Will Tavlin discusses when he speaks of ‘‘the  movies that go down best when you’re not paying attention.’’ (n+1) How one achieves that attention is the individual viewer’s concern. For some it will be a home entertainment system with a projector, for another a flat-screen TV, a third a laptop with headphones, a fourth a cinema experience. Yet whatever it is, the film ought to be made as if with the awareness that it hasn’t been directed with inattentive expectation, with the idea that it isn’t “another Netflix movie made to half-watch while doing laundry.’’  (n+1) Train Dreams may be a Netflix product, but one that escapes such low expectations.


© Tony McKibbin