My house sits near two cemeteries.
To the East, there’s a cemetery that sits near a bus stop. It’s surrounded by a fence and, judging from the gravestones that I’ve seen, it was last used in 1917. It was a private cemetery, one that functioned as the final resting place for the members of one of the families who founded my hometown. To the west, there’s a park that is home to another private cemetery. It’s also surrounded by a fence. That fence wasn’t always there but it went up a few years ago because people were vandalizing the tomb stones and breaking the statues that had stood there for over a hundred years. How sick to do you have to be vandalize a graveyard?
Occasionally, when I’m near either one of the two cemeteries, I’ll take some time to look at the names on the headstones. The names are of people who I will never know. I’ll never know what they were like to live with or to eat dinner with. I’ll never know what hobbies occupied their time. I’ll never know what books they read. I’ll never know who they were. But I will always know that someone cared enough to erect a tombstone to let the world that person had once been alive. I will always know that, at some point, they were alive and they were a part of society.
I thought about those two cemeteries as I watched Train Dreams. Based on the award-winning novella by Denis Johnson, Train Dreams stars Joel Edgerton as Robert Grainier. At the start of the film, the narrator (Will Patton) tells us that Grainier lived for 80 years and he spent most of his life in Idaho. He never saw the ocean. He was an orphan who never learned who his parents were, when he was born, or how he came to be placed on a train in the late 19th century. The film follows Grainier as he goes from dropping out of school to working as a logger to marrying Gladys (Felicity Jones). He builds a cabin for Gladys to live in while he’s away looking for work. He and Gladys have a daughter named Kate.
Growing up at a time when the frontier had only recently been tamed and when death was considered to be acceptable risk for the men cutting down trees and laying down railroad tracks, Robert sees his share of disturbing things. As a child, he comes across as a mountain man who is slowly dying. Working for the railroad, he watches as one of his co-workers is casually tossed off a bridge. Later, the elderly and kind-hearted Arn Peebles (William H. Macy) is mortally injured in a random accident. When loggers die, their boots are hammered into a tree. Years, later those same trees are cut down and the boots are forgotten. And yet, for all the danger in Robert’s life, there are the moments that make it all worth it. Robert always returns home to his cabin and to the embrace of Gladys and the sight of his daughter growing up. He always returns to his family until he can’t anymore. As he ages, Robert isolates himself from civilization and becomes semi-legendary in the nearby town. But, as always, legends are eventually forgotten.
Visually, it’s a hauntingly beautiful film. The scenery is stunning, even while Robert and his fellow loggers are busy changing it by chopping down trees. But there’s always a hint of danger hiding behind the beauty. A forest fire brings an eerie, orange tint to the sky but it also destroys many lives and dreams. Joel Edgerton gives a strong performance as Robert, proving once again that he’s one of the few actors who can star in a period piece without looking out-of-place. Edgerton’s performance gives the film the humanity needed to keep it from becoming purely a film about visuals. As Robert, Edgerton rarely yells or shows much emotion at all. But his eyes tell us everything that we need to know.
With its stunning visuals, its narration, and its emphasis on nature, Train Dreams owes an obvious debt to Terence Malick. That said, it’s not quite as thematically deep as Malick’s best films. Whereas Malick would have been concerned about Robert’s place in both the universe and the afterlife, Train Dreams is more content to focus on Robert’s 80 years in Idaho (and occasionally Spokane). Whereas Malick often seems to be daring his audience to walk out, Train Dreams is very much about keeping you watching as Robert grows old. That’s not necessarily a criticism, of course. It’s just an acknowledgment that Train Dreams is the rarest of all creatures, an arthouse film that’s also a crowd pleaser. It doesn’t alienate its audience but it does so at the cost of the risks that make Malick’s later films so fascinating, if occasionally frustrating. That said, Train Dreams does stick with you. I’ll be thinking about the final 20 minutes for quite some time.
Train Dreams tells the story of a man — one of many — who may have been forgotten by history but who mattered during his 80 years on this Earth. In the end, Robert Grainier serves as a stand-in for all the people who lived their lives as American rapidly changed from being a frontier to being a superpower. The world may forget him but the viewer never will.
Through the Shattered Lens 