Train Dreams (2025)

PG-13.  It's weird to think of prestige in terms of "PG-13."  Like, there's stuff.  There's the silhouette of a married couple in bed together.  Nothing vulgar.  But, like, just enough to make everyone in the room feel uncomfortable.  The kids weren't watching this movie, but they were in the room.  I don't even remember vulgar language because the protagonist is so soft-spoken.  I'm sure that there was something more than nothing said in there, but nothing really stood out.  Also, this is the story of the death of a child.  If anything, this is a story about mortality, so there is death as a motif that sometimes gets uncomfortable.

DIRECTOR: Clint Bentley

Holy moley.  Clint Bentley loves Terrence Malick.  Before I go too deep into that, there's going to be a lot of scatterbrain in this blog.  La La Land is playing in the background and I'm trying to ignore this truly amazing movie.  But I will acknowledge that, in no way, am I good at multitasking.  So if I come across as all-over-the-place, that's the reason.  

Okay, Terrence Malick.  I was not a big fan of Clint Bentley's script for Sing Sing.  I thought it was overly sentimental and a bit manipulative.  Now, Bentley didn't write the script by himself for Train Dreams.  It was based on a novella and he wrote it with someone else.  Maybe this is a guy that I have to pay attention to.  Like many film snobs, I like Terrence Malick.  If I didn't know better, I would say that Train Dreams is a Terrence Malick movie.  It's beautiful in its paradoxical smallness and awesomeness.  It's shot beautifully.  It is a small story of a small man.  People act like people.  Honestly, the greatest compliment that I can give Train Dreams is the fact that it is a lot like Malick because I feel like Malick gives us better insight into the nature of the soul than he does focusing on bombastic, over-the-top moments.   That's kind of funny because The Tree of Life has dinosaurs in it.  Train Dreams doesn't pull that card.  The closest thing that Bentley does in terms of pulling grandiose moments is his use of fire and really stressing how long a life really is.

I don't know why I was so hung up on the aging of Granier.  One thing that I don't think a lot of stories get right is how much society changes in a single lifetime. Maybe it is because we have had these major technological shifts a while ago and that the past twenty-six years have felt ultimately stagnant.  But Granier's youth is a setting where you could just find a plot of land, build a house by hand, and have the ultimate settler fantasy.  But by the time he dies, he watches television of John Glen going to space.  It's weird to think about that kind of stuff.  Like I mentioned, this is a story about mortality and with mortality comes ideas of aging.  One of the key ideas is the fact that people become obsolete.  When a chainsaw shows up in this story about lumberjacks sawing things by hand, it was such a small moment in terms of how much film was used.  But from a narrative perspective, it spoke wonders. 

Maybe that's why I'm so impressed by this movie.  Nothing in this film is really telegraphed.  Nothing is a sledgehammer.  It's a movie that asks for investment.  I don't find that investment hard.  Maybe that's why Malick and Bentley are obsessed with making a movie so darned pretty.  It's easy to invest in a movie where sunlight cuts through trees and silence isn't quite silence.  Instead, it's heartbeats and birds.  Speaking of the sun cutting through the trees, it almost feels like there's foley to the light cutting through trees.  Yeah, yeah.  We all know that light doesn't make a sound.  But what I'm ultimately dancing around is the notion that this is a movie that embraces the senses while keeping the story fundamentally about Granier and his quiet pain.

I won't deny that this movie is a bummer.  It is a bummer.  A lot of Academy Award nominees tend to be bummers.  But the message I take away from this movie is that life is built upon tragedy.  Granier doesn't have a rich life.  He found true love.  He compounded that true love by becoming a father.  But all it took was one tragedy to reshape how the rest of his life was going to play out.  The real villain of the piece is hope.  Because it isn't exactly cut and dry what happened to his wife and daughter, there's this expectation that is placed on himself to wait for his life to return to normal.  When he loses his family, he eventually rebuilds his house.  When cutting season begins, he goes off and does that in the hopes that his wife and child will find the home that he recreated for them.  It's brutal.  And there's this small betrayal when he finds embers (pun intended) of happiness.  The fact that he instantly finds some degree of solace in Red Dog doesn't change the main character and his internal conflict.  He still has nightmares about the house catching fire and his wife trying to save their daughter.  SBut we get something that Shakespeare points out in Hamlet.  One of Hamlet's self-aware commentaries about the world through his eyes is that the world is an untended garden.  He knows that there is beauty in the world, but it is flat and sad.  When Granier embraces the companionship of Red Dog, he sees the beauty of that dog but still aches for the fulfillment of fatherhood.

There's something really mean about the ending of this movie.  It's the girl that he starts calling Katie.  If the villain of the piece his hope, Katie is the ultimate gut punch.  Late in the film, Granier wakes up to hear whimpering outside.  There, he discovers a girl barely alive.  Her leg is broken and we're all teased with the notion that this might be his daughter coming to look for him.  But the narrator almost dispells that notion pretty quickly.  The temptation to see that girl as Katie is all that Granier can see.  We want it to be Katie.  We almost need it as much as Granier does.  After all, the world, from Granier's perspective, contains the same cruelty as an absentee father.  When she's gone in the morning (although, I do have to question how she not only got out there on a broken leg but got so far that she was unable to be found), we have confirmation that either she didn't exist (not my first theory) or that she isn't Kate.  Yet, that's the slow misery of the world.  It's not that the girl that Granier thought was Katie was cruel.  She was probably confused and had no idea how she got in this bed.  She was on the run and kept going.  Yet, her small action affected Granier throughout.

I can't help but have this also be a story about karma.  One of the earlier events of the film is the fact that Granier fails to save Fu Sheng.  Fu Sheng ends up being a ghost for Granier throughout the story.  Every time you forget that he exists, he sits there and watches Granier bear his cross by a fire or something.  The really odd thing is that this is almost a tale of what hurts a sensitive soul.  Granier isn't one of the people who killed Fu Sheng.  If anything, Granier is one of the few people who stands up for Fu Sheng.  Fu Sheng, in his fear, thinks that Granier is one of the people trying to kill him and kicks him off.  Yet, Granier views his failure to save this man as a lifelong condemnation and a justification for all of the bad things that happened to him.  I get the vibe that those who killed him barely remember that time.  It was such a casual attitude of anti-Asian sentiment that it was done without pomp and circumstance.  Yet, for Granier, that failure equates almost to complicity, which colors the way that he views the cruel world around him.

I really liked it.  Is the movie incredibly small?  Yeah.  Absolutely.  I know me and, as much as I'm applauding it now, there's a good chance I will forget about this movie given any reasonable amount of time.  Still, Train Dreams is powerful.  It's a beautiful film and I am giving Clint Bentley another chance.