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). 

Janet Planet

 

Writer/director Annie Baker on the set

Annie Baker with Elias Koteas

Annie Baker with Sophie Okonedo

JANET PLANET       B+                                                                                                         USA  Great Britain  (113 mi)  2023  d: Annie Baker

Winner of a Pulitzer prize-winning play, The Flick, by Annie Baker, in 2014, and named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017, Baker is one of the preeminent voices of her generation while also a professor teaching playwriting in various institutions, including NYU, Barnard College, Hunter College, the University of Texas at Austin, and Stony Brook Southamption.  Married to Nico Baumbach, younger brother of Noah, fictionally portrayed by Owen Kline in Noah’s autobiographical family portrait The Squid and the Whale (2005), currently a film theorist and professor at Columbia University, and part of the extended family of film director partners Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, with Baker appearing briefly in Baumbach’s While We're Young (2014), her first film as a writer and director is unusual in that it appears to be told from the perspective of a quirky 11-year old child, Lacy (Zoe Ziegler, who has her own YouTube channel, Zoe._.Ziegler), a lonely, introverted, yet delightfully insightful daughter who has no real friends of her own, but has an extremely close relationship with her single mother Janet, an effectively understated Julianne Nicholson, most recently seen in Krystoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario (2023).  What sets this apart is not only the time period of 1991, when the director would have been the same childhood age, but more importantly the woodland setting outside Amherst, Massachusetts (where Baker was raised) known as the Happy Valley, a quiet and peaceful rural community known for its beautiful trees and wildlife, where it recalls that spacy West coast atmosphere of growing up in the 60’s, when alternative living was in vogue, like living off the land in communes.  It’s rare for films to capture that unpretentious mentality so effortlessly, but this is one of the better mother/daughter films out there, as they actually talk and listen to one another, respecting what the other person has to say, strangely enough still sharing a bed together, remaining organically attached, with the director having a gift for extremely natural and realistic dialogue that is reminiscent of a Cassavetes film, complete with “likes,” “ums,” and plenty of weird pauses, where the hushed silences are full of meaning.  They remain isolated from the outside world, living in their own private world where time passes slowly, Time Passes Slowly YouTube (2:36), a song that doesn’t actually play in the film, but it appropriately captures the time and space this film travels in, completely removed from the social media rampage and hurried pace of modern life.  Baker’s plays are lessons of empathy, as she is a playwright who carefully listens to people, re-creating human speech with such delicacy that her characters feel startlingly familiar, as if we know these people.  That is the beauty of this film, a study in mood and character, as it takes us places we’ve never been, having the luxury of spending time with people we never knew, yet they remind us not only of ourselves but those people around us.  From the outset, we know this is operating on a different wavelength, with an unhurried, unconventional structure of scenes that rarely have a traditional beginning and end, but seem to exist midway between, often cutting off midstream or lingering long after they presumably end, utilizing a short script, shooting only 50 of the screenplay’s 70 pages, with a sound design that encapsulates the noises of nature, particularly frogs and crickets at night.  Reflecting a lifestyle we probably tuned out years ago, this takes us back anyways, immersed in such a beautiful pastoral setting that allows us to simply spend time with these two characters who we become become intimately familiar with by the end, as if they are members of our own families.  Drawing comparisons to the self-reflective cinema of Charlotte Wells’ 2023 Top Ten List #7 Aftersun or the magical realist world Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman (2021), a compelling aspect of the film is that it takes us into the imagination of a child, where there are moments of adolescence that have not yet been articulated into words, but remain unspoken, a time of confusion and uncertainty, but also magic, with this film drawn to those inexplicable feelings of growing up, where we carefully observe the adults around us, trying to understand the mistakes they make, along with their sadness and pain.

Shot on 16mm by Swedish cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff, known for her work with Icelandic filmmaker Hlynur Pálmason, using oblique angles and unique compositions, this contemplative, low-budget indie film with lengthy takes subtly captures a hidden life we rarely have access to, drawing on fragments of dialogue, casual conversations, and a calculated use of reflective silences to focus on the quiet drama of everyday life, exploring how our environment and the people that inhabit it end up shaping us, yet perhaps the biggest surprise is that Janet talks to Lacy like an adult.  Reminiscent of Anna Paquin’s candid relationship with Holly Hunter in Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993), this is a portrait of two lost souls coming together over a brief period of time, with Lacy having a rather possessive relationship with her mother, where all outsiders feel like interlopers.  An atypical maternal figure, drawn to the counterculture hippie lifestyle, yet still feeling a bit lost, Janet seems to collect people, apparently attracted to damaged men she can take care of, appealing to her nurturing instincts, perhaps rooted in a difficult relationship with her Holocaust survivor father, while Lacy is influenced by the peripheral people she lets into her life, even spying on them, but it's never permanent.  The only constant in Janet’s life is her daughter, as friendships come and go, but Janet and her daughter are two misfits bound together by trust and love, expressed with a refreshing lack of sentimentality.  Lacy watches her mother intently, shown with remarkable detail and sensitivity as she practices Suzuki piano lessons on her miniature keyboard while also delving into imaginative worlds of her own creation, occasionally breaking out in humorously direct outbursts, like “You know what’s funny?  Every moment of my life is hell,” while Janet is a healing acupuncturist who works out of their home, with the name Janet Planet appearing on the front door identifying her place of business.  Lacy has little figurines that she arranges like an extended family on a small shelf, opening and closing a curtain, as if putting them to bed for the night, providing her immeasurable comfort, evoking similar scenes from Ingmar Bergman’s FANNY AND ALEXANDER (1982).  Following other playwrights who have successfully made the transition to directing films, like Harold Pinter, Kenneth Lonergan, Martin McDonagh, Neil LaBute, Mike Leigh, David Mamet, John Patrick Shanley, or more recently Celine Song and Tina Satter, this film is told in chapter headings, where each chapter marks both a beginning and an end, like the changing seasons, reflecting people that wander in and out of their lives.  First and foremost this is a quiet film, offering an experience of watching ordinary people doing ordinary things, where the surprises that come are reflected in how Lacy views what she sees, as both mother and daughter struggle with human connection.  The first chapter is Janet’s current boyfriend Wayne (Will Patton), a Vietnam veteran with a troubled past.  While he has a daughter, Sequoia (Edie Moon Kearns), that lives with her mother, Lacy enjoys playing with her, as we see them gleefully running around a shopping mall like an adventure playground, a happy and joyful experience, yet she’s endlessly curious why she doesn’t live with Wayne, a question he never answers, but seems to grow more and more irritated by the question, at one point succumbing to a migraine headache, where Lacy’s pestering questions touch a nerve, perturbed that she won’t leave the room when asked, growing so exasperated that he lunges at her, which is the last we see of Wayne.  Janet asks her daughter what to do, and Lacy suggests that she break up with Wayne.  As simple as that may be, what mothers actually take their 11-year old daughter’s advice?  That, in itself, is a revelation, as is the music heard by Laurie Anderson, Laurie Anderson - My Eyes (Remastered) YouTube (5:28), an artist who sings about the randomness of our fates and the seeming insignificance of our place in the universe, asking existential questions about the choices people make. 

The film takes a different turn in the next chapter entitled Regina, as the two of them visit an unusual performance troupe in a local farm commune that features life-size puppets (from an artist-run theater company, Double Edge Theatre Official Website), which takes us back in time, singing Elizabethan rounds and madrigals, including the melancholic Round and Round by Libana, YouTube (2:15), an a cappella women’s chorus, recalling the atmosphere of outdoor country fairs (like the Oregon Country Fair), with Janet recognizing one of the actresses as an old friend, Regina (Sophie Okonedo), who soon comes to live with them.  While she’s black and speaks with a British accent, she has that same laid-back atmosphere of the 60’s, a soul searcher attempting to find meaning in her life, hoping a change will do her good, taking up Janet’s offer to literally rescue her from a group that she describes as cult-like, Janet Planet Exclusive Movie Clip - What's a Cult? YouTube (1:39).  Despite their longtime friendship, and a few adventures with Lacy, Do lots of people fall in love with you? #JanetPlanet TikTok (1:07), Regina intrudes on their familiar space, getting high together with Janet and suddenly turns judgmental, stumbling into unwelcome psychic regions, Who’s to say? Annie Baker’s #JanetPlanet is now playing in ... TikTok (54 seconds), bringing a heavy sadness that suggests she’s still got her own issues to work out, with her ex-boyfriend, the theater group leader Avi (Elias Koteas), seen out the window picking her up and returning her back to the commune.  That’s the lead-in to the third chapter, Avi, the bearded yet soft-spoken, spiritual guru from the commune, who’s much nicer than Janet was led to believe from Regina, surprisingly so, quickly growing closer together, where the biggest surprise is that he goes off on these off-kilter philosophical tangents that come out of nowhere, with both Janet and Lacy seemingly in awe and admiration, as if in a trance, but the hypnotic spell quickly wears off and he disappears back to the commune as well, leaving mother and daughter alone once again to reflect on their lives.  With undercurrents of mysticism and spirituality, this is the kind of film that will completely alienate conventional viewers, lacking the patience to discover what lies beneath.  An unusual coming-of-age film, going against the grain of child performances, Lacy’s communication style is very direct, something her mother calls “forthrightness,” nothing particularly off-putting, but it can be startling coming from a child who’s so openly curious, observant, and straightforward.  Her mother, whose performance seems to evolve over time, has a speech late in the film that penetrates to the very soul, with Lacy remaining completely silent after asking if her mother would mind if she dated a girl, responding that she’s often thought she might be a lesbian due to her assertiveness, which might be too much for a man, yet remains judgment free (all the more impressive since it comes during the AIDS epidemic), while also confessing about her own cyclical series of constant ups and downs with revolving partners, wondering if that array of swirling emotions has screwed up her life (Baker’s own parents each married multiple times, which can be very destabilizing as a child, very infuriating), thoughts few mothers would ever consider sharing with their daughters, yet that’s essentially the heart of the film, as this young girl is trying to find her place in the world with a mother who doesn’t seem to have ever found her place.  While there are sudden revelatory monologues, and a mystical presence that surrounds the story’s edges, the motivations of the characters are often left unexplained, yet each, in their own way, is searching for self-acceptance.  One afternoon, during a bucolic picnic, Avi reads to Janet a section of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Elegy IV by Rainer Maria Rilke - Famous poems, where afterwards he admits, “I really like you.”  But she is more interested in the poem than the man, asking him to “Read it again.”

… and when I feel
inclined to wait before the puppet stage, no,
rather to stare at it so intensely that in the end
to counter-balance my searching gaze, an angel
has to come as an actor, and begin manipulating
the lifeless bodies of the puppets to perform.
Angel and puppet! Now at last there is a play!
Then what we separate can come together by our
very presence. And only then the entire cycle
of our own life-seasons is revealed and set in motion.