Train Dreams

Director Clint Bentley

director on the set with Joel Edgerton

novelist Denis Johnson

TRAIN DREAMS      B                                                                                                           USA  (102 mi)  2025  d: Clint Bentley

There were once passageways to the old world; strange trails, hidden paths.  You’d turn a corner and suddenly find yourself face-to-face with the great mystery, the foundation of all things.  And even though that old world is gone now, even though it’s been rolled up like a scroll and put somewhere, you can still feel the echo of it.                                                             —opening narration (Will Patton)

Adapted from a 108-page novella by Denis Johnson, initially appearing in The Paris Review in 2002 before published on its own in 2011, one of three works of fiction nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2012, along with David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King and Karen Russell’s Swamplandia, but in a controversial decision no book was awarded the prize that year, the first time in 35 years.  His 1986 novel was also the source material for the Claire Denis film Stars at Noon (2022), which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, another film about isolation and existentialism.  Set in the Pacific Northwest at the turn of the 20th century with the building of the transcontinental railroads, forest loggers met with railroad men to tame the American West, falling trees in abundance, literally carving out sides of mountains to make way for the coming future, opening up pockets of America’s Western frontier to expansion in a bid to interconnect the country, much like the interstate highway system did for cars in the 1950’s.  Using a blurred effect that reads like “a waking dream,” much as he did in his earlier much-celebrated short story collection Jesus’ Son in 1992, using unsettling, dreamlike qualities to express a state of mind preoccupied by deeper, metaphysical accounts of the changing world around them, with the film using lengthy voiceover narration passages, which many compare to the pervasive transcendental style of Terrence Malick, especially 2011 Top Ten Films of the Year #1 The Tree of Life, as it moves from realism into the metaphysical and back, navigating a line between truth and the American frontier myth.  Deeply contemplative, this is like an early David Gordon Green movie, George Washington (2000) or All the Real Girls (2003), the kind of thing nobody makes anymore (including Green), like an ancient relic, or a lone tree dwarfed by the massive overgrowth of the surrounding woods, as it places the poetry of mood and atmosphere over any narrative coherence, with the natural beauty of the landscapes becoming a character of its own.  Co-written by Bentley and Greg Kwedar, beautifully shot almost entirely outdoors, by Brazilian cinematographer Adolpho Veloso, where the strength of the film is the natural surroundings in an elegiac portrait of Robert Grainier, Australian actor Joel Edgerton, from David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom (2010), Jeff Nichols’ Loving (2016), and Barry Jenkins’ 2021 #2 Film of the Year The Underground Railroad- made for TV (2021), who is a simple man living in the mountains of northern Idaho near the Canadian border, making his living as a logger before transitioning to working for the railroad.  Immediately we are introduced to unsettling racist and xenophobic elements of the American Dream, namely those who were deprived from participating, as relentless and unending violence eradicated many of the Chinese laborers in a form of a deeply disturbing ethnic cleansing, witnessing the mass deportation of a hundred or more Chinese families, while often violently killing these Asian laborers in plain sight of the others, accused of alleged crimes before subjecting them to mob justice.  Ghostly visions of one murdered man, Fu Sheng (Alfred Hsing), continually flashes in the head of Grainier, who “was baffled by the casualness of the violence,” whose guilt haunts him for the rest of his life, posing the question, “Do you think the bad things we do follow us in life?,” leading him to suspect that he is subject to some obscure curse that follows him through the rest of his days and haunts his dreams, like the recurrence of traumatic damage, a reminder of the perils that come with the forming of a new frontier, which is anything but civilized, as the killings go unpunished.  The film pulls back from the most unforgiving elements of the novella’s critique, where contemporary climate disasters are essentially coupled with the long histories of settler colonialism and racial violence that epitomizes the American frontier.  

In the beginning, Grainier grows close to a man named Arn Peeples (William H. Macy), an old logger full of stories and an explosives expert who befriends him, where he stands out by not saying much, as opposed to the other endlessly chatty workers who actually have even less to say.  They form a bond that is larger than a friendship, one built on mutual respect and admiration, but Arn succumbs to a falling tree branch that hits him in the head, a notorious forest widowmaker that immediately reminds them of the inherent dangers of working in the woods.  His death is marked by nailing his boots to the tree, a poetic tribute that only accentuates how easily things can go wrong working under such primitive conditions, yet that’s also one of the reason jobs are so plentiful, as the hazards can outweigh the benefits, so the work really only attracts single men unattached to families.  Grainier drifts from job to job until he meets Gladys (Felicity Jones, so effective in Brady Corbet’s 2025 Top Ten List #3 The Brutalist) one Sunday after church, falling immediately head-over-heels in love, and they marry shortly afterwards, building a small cabin in a remote acre of the wilderness along the banks of the Moyie River.  In a film with intense highs and extreme lows, suddenly all he wanted to do was share the rest of his life living in the woods with her, having a young daughter named Kate, but Grainier is a man of few words, defined by facial expressions and long silences, with loneliness etched into his face, offering sparse, yet precise dialogue, where the much more revealing voiceover narration is exquisitely read by actor Will Patton, who also provided narration for the audiobook, giving the film a literary quality, providing greater insight into what we are seeing, with a quiet, unobtrusive, and barely audible musical score written by The National’s Bryce Dessner.  An ode to a vanishing way of life, the film actually recounts 80-years of his life (living into the 1960’s), orphaned as a child, never knowing who his parents were, dropping out of school, wandering from place to place, seemingly directionless until he meets Gladys, and suddenly he has a purpose.  Yet in order to survive, he has to spend long periods of time away from home in order to earn an income, which comes at a cost, as they both feel the wearying effects of his absence, not to mention a child who barely knows her father.  So they hatch a plan to build a lumber mill, allowing him to work closer to home, but in order to finance the project he’s forced into one more logging excursion, which is cut short by apocalyptic visions of fire and smoke billowing into the sky, a raging forest fire literally seen for miles, where the damage swallows up his family and his home, as well as much of the surrounding landscape, all reduced to ashes, yet their loss gives his life meaning, as he refuses to let them go.  Staying on the charred grounds in the event they might happen to return, he remains lost and alone, literally a hermit in the woods, reminiscent of Robert Redford’s survivalist in Sydney Pollack’s JEREMIAH JOHNSON (1972).  In the tradition of 20th century American frontier fiction, like Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918), the novel is darker in tone, told out of order, with a more complicit protagonist who is definitely guilty, with a less than admirable character, refusing explanation at the end, while the film is more linear and ambiguously open-ended, turning the protagonist into an ordinary but exemplary everyman who is our silent witness to the transformation of America in the 20th century, softening the harsh tone to literally questioning the meaning of our existence rather than continually reeling from the devastation erupting all around us.

After such an impactful tragedy, the film leans even more heavily on its visual language, Visuals - Train Dreams (4K) YouTube (4:43), becoming a profound meditation on existence, on grief and loss, and on the great mystery of all things, with lengthy philosophical ruminations expressed through the existential narration.  Finding work transporting goods to and from the railroad, he develops a spiritual friendship with a local Indigenous merchant, Ignatius Jack (Nathaniel Arcand), seemingly his only friend left in the world when he’s down in the dumps, while also meeting another fiercely independent woman who is quite comfortable living alone, Claire (Kerry Condon, from Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin, 2022), the first woman to work for the U.S. Forest Service, brought in to survey the aftermath of the devastating fire, living in an elevated fire lookout tower to have a better view of developing forest fires.  Her unique, otherworldly residence takes him by surprise, as does her openly friendly nature, where she seems to understand him better than others, perhaps because she’s had her own experience with death, having lost a husband to a long, protracted illness, Train Dreams | Joel Edgerton and Kerry Condon "Threaded ... YouTube (49 seconds).  Grainier has visions of his wife and daughter, continually walking through the woods where he thinks he can feel their spirits, being very quiet and careful, hoping not to drive them away.  One night he believes he has discovered an injured Kate, now grown up and covered in soot, with a broken leg, cleaning her up while tending to her wounds, but by morning she has disappeared without a trace.  A film about getting swept into the current of incomprehensible change, nature is not just a place of beauty and danger, but watching humans tap into its calm indifference represents a spirit of freedom, offering a poetic space of memory and dreams.  Somber and unromanticized, the language of dreams and reality are interwoven, all blending together, where it’s hard to separate one from the other, which adds a poetic feel to every frame of the film, with Edgerton underplaying every fiber of Grainier’s character, creating a minimalist effect, even though this is an expansive, historical film that weaves its way into the present.  The railroad becomes a symbol of man’s intrusion into nature, a transformation no one can stop, marking progress into modernity, but it too becomes outdated, as wooden bridges across deep river gorges, which were viewed at the time as marvels of engineering, are soon replaced by those made of concrete-and-steel, which is like watching an old world disappear, encapsulating a deep sense of melancholy, becoming not only an elegy for the American West, but a reminder that all our work will eventually become obsolete.  Near the end we see Grainier take a ride on a fixed-wing biplane, which encircles the surrounding forest, allowing him to inspect it from above, providing a unique vantage point, like a God’s-eye view, as events from his life flash through his mind as the plane loops through the air, a reminder that the world keeps changing around him.  In a rare visit to Spokane in 1962, he pauses by a TV screen in a storefront window and witnesses images of astronaut John Glenn in space, allowing him to contemplate his own mortality, while the narrator recounts that Robert died in his sleep in his cabin in November 1968, leaving no heirs, but that on that spring day in the plane, “as he misplaced all sense of up and down, he felt, at last, connected to it all,” Watch the Final Scene of 'Train Dreams' | Anatomy of a Scene YouTube (2:33). 

On Swift Horses

 

Director Daniel Minahan

author Shannon Pufahl

ON SWIFT HORSES             B                                                                                                     USA  (117 mi)  2024  d: Daniel Minahan

You ever feel like that, though?  Like there’s just this narrow window of time when what you want might come to you?

A mostly slow and quiet 50’s film about forbidden desires, or the underside of the American Dream, where people are not what they appear to be or act like we expect, carefully concealing their queer desires in order to be accepted into the Eisenhower postwar mainstream, when white conservatism was guided by rules that excluded anyone who was different, often violently, feeling no remorse whatsoever in their exclusionary behavior, nothing to apologize for, as a fast track to success depended on it.  Adapted by Bryce Kass from the 2019 novel by Shannon Pufahl (an excerpt may be read here: On Swift Horses), now teaching creative writing at Stanford University, who grew up in rural Kansas, inspired by memories of her own grandmother, dedicating the book to her, introducing the young author to the world of gambling at a young age, accompanying her on many trips to Las Vegas, driving from one gambling mecca to the next, setting the story in the mid-50’s, a time of promise, yet also dreams deferred, exploring repressed desires and a fluctuating identity during a time when the nation was going through a major peacetime transformation, not yet sure what to expect, yet the outlook for the future was an unlimited horizon.  Exuding a strong sense of place, inimitably drawn to the 1950’s American West, a time that preceded the Civil Rights movement of the 60’s, typically seen through the eyes of straight white men, this film is rich with detail, showcasing unique characters who counter the narrative of a conservatively safe and secure America, where they are instead willing to take risks, gambling with their lives that something better lies ahead. Described by the director as “a re-imagining of the American Dream through a queer lens,” this film relies on small coded gestures, like a glance, a lingering touch, or a matchbook passed along, where gambling is used as a metaphor for being queer during a time when it was extremely dangerous, considered a crime, something kept under the rug, with almost no public discourse about it, barely ever mentioned or talked about in the mainstream, yet they are ordinary people leading ordinary lives.  While he’s worked in television, including several episodes of Game of Thrones (2011 – 2019), as well as American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace (2018), this is only the second film from this director since the comedy noir thriller SERIES 7: THE CONTENDERS (2001), an edgy satire on reality TV shows run wild.  Very faithful to the book, a historical fiction novel with LGBTQ+ themes, and while it pales in comparison to the generation-defining Ang Lee adaptation of Brokeback Mountain (2005), this film offers a vision of the 50’s that is distinctly at odds with the idea that this decade was an American golden age, evocative of the subversive melodramas of Douglas Sirk, like All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Written On the Wind (1956), or Todd Haynes’ FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002) and 2015 Top Ten List #6 Carol, with a nod to Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road (2008), reminding us that there was never a time when women didn’t work outside the home, where nostalgic reflections often omit the bigotry and oppression experienced.  Beautifully shot by Luc Montpellier, Sarah Polley’s cinematographer who shot Take This Waltz (2011) and 2023 Top Ten List #1 Women Talking, this is part romance, part suspense thriller, and part drama, filled with multiple meandering subplots, where in the end the disparate elements may never really come together, feeling uneven, lacking a coherent vision, but there’s a literary aspect that feels intimately familiar.    

In the immediate aftermath of the Korean War, atomic bombs are being tested in the empty desert outside of Las Vegas, a spectacle that literally lights up the skies, drawing plenty of spectators, yet it’s also an era of suburban sprawl and a massive national highway movement connecting the entire country together, while there are also advancements in color television, all of which plays in the background of the story, cleverly announced by a melancholic Loren Kramar cover version of 1959 HITS ARCHIVE: Mr. Blue - Fleetwoods (a #1 record) YouTube (2:23), which plays over a collage of photo albums from the period, with an original score composed by Mark Orton.  Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Lee (Will Poulter) are living a quiet life in an isolated part of Kansas, in a home Muriel’s late mother left to her, with floral wallpaper and old wooden furniture, where no neighbor can be seen for miles, yet the prevailing sentiment is that Muriel feels “orphaned and alone” after the death of her mother, the first woman in town to get a car, a college degree, and a divorce, so out of respect for her mother’s independence she’s been coy to Lee’s persistent marriage requests.  But that all changes when Lee’s more charismatic brother Julius arrives, played by Australian actor Jacob Elordi, who inhabited the role of Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla (2023), playing another free spirit of a different kind here, a wayward gambler with a secret past, whose mere presence stirs something deep inside Muriel, both feeling the same sense of alienation, like two lost souls.  The two brothers are close, having made a pact during the war that they would pool their money to buy a home together when the war was over, with the home providing a stability they never had, so for Lee, marriage is essential, as that embodies his conception of “home.”  Julius is more of a free spirit, immediately drawing the attention of Muriel, fascinated by his easygoing freedom, feeling an attraction that was not about sex which she doesn’t fully understand, yet both are acutely observant outsiders, making her feel that “the world was bigger than she had imagined.”  This idea of a love triangle incites a sudden interest in marriage, but as soon as they trek across the country to discover a brand new housing development in San Diego, Julius vanishes for Las Vegas, sleeping with women and men for money, eventually hooking up with a Vegas casino as part of their security detail, where his job is to surveil the customers from a one-way mirror located above the floor, where he can view them undetected from a variety of angles, earning extra bonuses when he spots cheaters, who are never prosecuted, but taken out back where they are brutally pummeled and run out of town.  It’s Lee’s dream to own a suburban house, one that Muriel acquiesces to, even if that means she’ll have to sell her mother’s house, which for her is a personal oasis and her only real connection to family, one of the many sacrifices she’ll have to make in the interest of keeping up appearances, which is all a façade, as she’s never really loved Lee or wanted to be part of his straightlaced world, but was always more fascinated by his restless brother, lured by his existential angst, yet Lee has warned her about Julius, “He’s not like us; his passions are different…he gets to live like there’s no tomorrow.”  Nonetheless, they secretly correspond with one another by mail, encouraging each other, sharing their private thoughts, unbeknownst to her husband.  Yet the manner in which this evolves can feel overly predetermined, lacking any feeling of naturalness or spontaneity, where it all fits together, but lacks dramatic urgency until the final few sequences that add a distinctly poetic texture.  

In something of parallel stories, the heart of the film is following the secret lives of both Muriel and Julius, both using deception as a means of self-preservation, with Muriel working as a waitress at a racetrack café, keeping notes on what she’s able to overhear, then placing bets accordingly, where her success rate is phenomenal, earning a healthy stack of money, which she contributes to the down payment on their new home, telling her husband she got the money by selling the home in Kansas, but she keeps a secret stash behind a mirror, offering her a sense of independence, while Julius develops a crush for another man, Henry, played by Diego Calva from Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (2022), both working next to each other by night while having steamy sex during the day.  Muriel has a few secret flings of her own, both with women, meeting Gail (Katrina Cunningham) at the track, a sultry blonde, eventually finding she hangs out at the dingy Chester Hotel catering to a same sex clientele, introducing her to an undiscovered world where men dance with men and women with women, where she is informed, “We’re all just a hair’s breadth from losing everything, all the time,” while closer to home she runs into Sandra (Sasha Calle), who is part of a vibrant queer community, trying to keep her family farm operational on her own while a proposed highway is expected to cut through her land, something passed down from her Mexican heritage.  In each case, curiosity gets the best of them, yet the scenes are surprisingly tame, with no real nudity, only occasional flashes of skin, where the real problem lies with British actress Daisy Edgar-Jones, who generates no real erotic chemistry or heat, and is surprisingly bland in her personality, feeling overly naïve, with her ultra-repressed housewife resembling Anne Hathaway, where she just has difficulty carrying a picture.  Jacob Elordi, on the other hand, is a throwback to the personal magnetism of 50’s screen icons like James Dean or Montgomery Clift, where he and Henry exhibit passion right from the start and it never lets up, even when they’re no longer onscreen, as it carries over.  There’s a subtle jab at race differences, as both Muriel and Julius have it so much easier than the paths of Sandra and Henry because they’re white, easily forgiven for their many transgressions, as no one ever scrutinizes their behavior, with Sandra at one point expressing outrage at Muriel’s patronizing attitude, showing little regard for what others are subjected to, where this issue is more hinted at than elaborated with any degree of depth.  Instead the prevailing emotion is a melancholic anguish, as neither love nor the American Dream provide any real degree of satisfaction, where there’s a gaping hole missing that is left unfilled, taking great pains to explain what it was like being closeted in the 50’s, an era where repressed sexuality and queer relations go hand in hand, eloquently interweaving Southern California’s illicit gay joints, Mexico, and memories of Kansas, where the most poignant image is a Chester Hotel bulletin board for lost lovers who have missed their connections, leaving little personal notes attached, often with photos, in hopes they could find each other, which is how they maintained connections in the shadows, emblematic of how queer people always find each other, even in the most repressed environments, with Muriel finally discovering that the mystery Julius represents actually resides deep within her own restless soul.  The finale offers the allure of freedom, a possibility of a better future, but it’s etched in heartbreak and despair, where distance is real, whether emotionally or geographically, reflective of the extreme isolation queer people felt at the time, as each gets increasingly lonely and lost, beautifully encapsulated by the melancholic song written exclusively for the film playing over the end credits, Loren Kramar’s Song For Henry YouTube (4:15), where it’s hard to imagine this story ending any other way.