Director-writer Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, with cowriter Greg Kwedar, arrives on Netflix this weekend after a two-week theatrical run. With a well-deserved 95% critical score at Rotten Tomatoes, this heartbreaking and inspiring Oscar contender says more than most other contenders by saying less but feeling more. Train Dreams The Review Bentley and Kwedar teamed on 2023’s spectacular Sing Sing, with Kwedar in the director’s chair, a film that should’ve gotten more Oscar love. The pair reunite for what is sure to be another Oscar nominated production with this acclaimed adaptation of Denis Johnson’s Pulitzer-nominated novella Train Dreams. A few other releases, including One Battle After Another (read my review here), Sinners (which expanded into IMAX and then got a re-release to remind everyone why it’s an inevitable Oscar nominee), Wicked: For Good (read my review here), Frankenstein (also from Netflix), and upcoming Avatar: Fire and Ash also look like shoo-ins, ForbesReview: ‘One Battle After Another’ Enters The Oscar Race As Mixed Bag I’m going to ask in advance for your patience, because Train Dreams is a film I don’t wish to give a simplified or straightforward review, because that’s not the sort of film it is and not how I reacted to it. I can’t review it without diving into the existential ideas and my own reactions to them. For those seeking the short version of a review, Train Dreams is gorgeously photographed and expertly directed, brilliantly acted, with moments and themes that say with you long after the story ends. I will revisit it again in the future, more than once, and I expect each time I’ll come away with some new revelation or feeling. Now, since I want to speak at length about the film, I’ll get a couple of minor complaints or “flaw discussions” out of the way up front. I’m not honestly a fan of voiceover narration. I’m even a heathen who says The Shawshank Redemption is better without Morgan Freeman’s narration, and if you doubt me then rewatch the scene of Andy playing an opera record over the prison loudspeaker and imagine it entirely without the narration. So while I appreciate some feel it lends a degree of “literary experience” to the adaptation, I’d prefer the story and information be conveyed on screen and not explained to me. There are fans of narration or others who don’t mind as much as I do, and that’s fine, they will be less bothered by the narration aspect of Train Dreams. But for me, the fact the film is so wonderfully made speaks to the reason it needed little adjustment to work without narration at all. ForbesReview-‘Wicked: For Good’ Works Its Magic To Rule Weekend Box Office There is recurring thematic reliance on the fact Robert feels punished for not stopping an injustice earlier in his life, and there are other moments when the film and other characters assert or confront later injustices while Robert bears witness. But the film relies on our ability to read between lines and accept Robert’s overall sense of goodness and his attempts to do right by others, and if you lack a shared perspective with the presumed-good Robert on those things then you are going to seriously fail to understand a lot of the rest of the film’s perspective and experience through Robert. This is not so much a complaint, I guess, as an observation that some of the film’s relevance is a passing reflection of how even though time changes and civilization evolves, we still see much of the same things unless/until we change ourselves and our own perspectives and if you aren’t willing to do that, even a little, then you will probably fail to comprehend much the film has to say. Which makes me wish the film had provided more of his actual more substantive moments of confronting “modern” advances and injustices compared with his earlier experiences, and that those moments were provided a bit more room to breathe as revelations in his life that become dots he connects as he grows older and tries to make sense of it all. Then again, perhaps those who lack the shared sense of injustice are precisely meant to lack insight into the film’s broader messages and Robert’s reactions to life, so that only if they are willing to fly upside-down a bit will they learn to look at things clearly enough to understand and learn the feeling of anger and disgust and grief at injustice, and the regret of inaction or “not being there” at the right times. Regardless, this is an ambitious film, as much as it is also a tale of a simple life in a complex world, and the combined grandeur of it and power of its filmmaking and acting. Joel Edgerton is never less than perfect, and his own career interestingly is one that could be called underappreciated in terms of relative attention and awareness for him personally despite delivering consistently top-shelf performances. His cheeks can glow with simple joy and he can laugh with a small child playing in the water, seeming at ease and at home in a life. His eyes can fill with torment and overwhelming realization of everything that has gone wrong in his world. His face can become a tired mask of regrets etched in lines and gray hairs, while his eyes still hold the fire of grief and impossible hope. Edgerton has long been one of my personal favorite actors to watch on screen, and as wonderful as Train Dreams is overall, it is Edgerton who gives it a mostly silent but roaring soul. Forbes‘Sinners’ Expands Into IMAX 70mm For Extended Summer Run Robert is a simple man, but his life is never simple, because he inhabits a world in which it’s impossible for anything to truly be simple, however small and meaningless it might seem. The insects, we are told, every single one of them, is an indispensable part of the living forest, a natural tapestry in which even we are threads, however far removed from it we might feel. On an outing at a carnival, Robert pays to see a show, and that moment is reflected later when he encounters an unexpected nighttime visitor. Reality and dream, illusion and truth, and how our mind can turn one into the other and back again, each separate part is a gem of its own yet the whole is greater than the sum of those parts. Our world, our lives, are entirely our own and entirely what we perceive them to be, or they are nothing at all. A mad collection of randomness, or a beautiful tapestry whose individual threads each are their own story, but only if you step back can you perceive the greater meaning and beauty of the world and of life itself. There is an impression of the cruelty and danger of the world, how fragile every life is, and Robert experiences more loss and grief than any one person should. But we come to understand the fragility of life, the short glimpse any of us is lucky enough to get of this world, is also part of what gives it beauty and meaning. This is not to make light of loss, nor a sacrament of suffering, but rather to say understanding the human condition is to understand we are part of the whole world and there could be none of the beauty and meaning an purpose without the fragility and loss. We attach emotion to events a fire that ravages a forest in order to eventually create a new forest and invite more life while culling that which became unsustainable, the loss of all of those trees and birds and mammals and lizards and insects, the loss of people, all of it part of a natural cycle necessary for the world to continue and life to sustain. We mourn the loss because it mattered to us, however small or short lived it might seem, even if the tapestry remains when our threads are cut short or pulled loose. Can we grieve loss while celebrating life? Can we allow ourselves to feel deeply enough and experience this world beyond simply our own lives? The film and its main character ponder these questions, whether searching for meaning is pointless or the only way to really find (or create?) meaning in the first place, that the search reminds us of the life lived and every moment both individually and together, and only having experienced it all can we then discern the meaning that comes from experiencing it and looking back. Robert spends the first half of his life looking ahead, and the second half looking back, searching for meaning he cannot find in the meaning he had but lost. “I wasn’t there” he says more than once, pitting the life he led and experiences he had against things that never existed, ghosts of non-memories. If this all sounds a bit surreal or esoteric, it of course is. We are talking about the meaning of life, about stories that speak to the meaning of life, about themes found in such stories and whether they point to meaning or to the idea that the only meaning in anything is what we choose to put into it, and the only thing we can put into it is ourselves. We see us, reflected back, our pursuits and our regrets, our love and our loss. Feeling blessed to be loved, cursed to lose that love, desperate in hope of finding it again, and lost if that hope is taken from us. In Train Dreams, Robert never loses hope, even when he seems lost in hopelessness at the world and all it has given or taken from him. Part of what makes him hurt so much is that he believes so strongly in his love and in his family. The hope causes him immeasurable pain, but also provides him with immeasurable strength and will to go on. He is in a way rewarded for that, perhaps, although he doesn’t always recognize it at the moment, instead slowly gaining insight and a clearer perspective of those threads with each step he takes back, seeing more and more of the life he’s led and the world he’s inhabited, with enough memories to piece it together. It’s the sort of grace we all hope for, to remember the love as much as the loss, and be grateful for it all.
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