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Train Dreams Is a Staggering Work of Art
Netflix just bought one of the best films of the year out of Sundance, but please, for the love of God, don’t watch this masterpiece on your phone.
In telling the seemingly unremarkable life story of one ordinary man, Clint Bentley’s trancelike film, based on Denis Johnson’s acclaimed 2012 novella, ruminates on the interconnectedness of all things, but it wears its metaphysics lightly. Joel Edgerton, an actor who is getting a lot more interesting as he ages, plays Robert Grainier, an orphan who winds up in a small Idaho town sometime at the turn of the century and spends most of his life laboring as a choker, a sawyer, and a logger, working to cut trees for the war effort in the 1910s and America’s ever-expanding railways and bridges. “Every thread we pull, we know not how it affects the design of things.” Later, as Grainier finds himself out of step with the increasingly mechanized and impersonal nature of his job, he passes by a dead bear cast atop a pile of wood — a sign that our desire to tame and harness the wilderness inevitably leads to its destruction.
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