“Age doesn’t arrive slowly, it comes in a rush. One day nothing has changed, a week later, everything has. A week may be too long a time, it can happen overnight.”
This is from James Salter’s novel All That Is. I don’t know why I thought of it while watching Clint Bentley’s new film Train Dreams.
Sometimes a writer leads you to another writer; a film to another film without necessarily overlapping. It’s more like a shouted echo in a gorge with an interval of silence. Salter and Denis Johnson, the writer of the novella from which the film is adapted, both have the hang of deep time: the way a life can last for pages that ultimately fold in on each other.
Train Dreams tells the story of Robert Grainier, played by Joel Edgerton in what has to be this excellent actor’s best performance so far. Robert makes his living cutting timber, and the rhythms of the work are marked by the immediate back-and-forth of sawing and chopping; the annual seasons of logging and the long arc of history that pushes the railroads across America, with insistent cruelty and obsolescence not far behind.
The moment that skews his life in a new direction, the knot in the grain of Grainier’s life, is his meeting with Gladys (Felicity Jones), with whom he builds a cabin and a family, but happiness is a fragile thing and idylls are made for burning.
Bentley – who along with long-time collaborator Greg Kewdar wrote the 2023 drama Sing Sing – shoots and edits the film in a way that recalls the great early work of that poet of American cinema, Terrence Malick. There’s even a scene where Gladys and Robert mark out the floor plan of their cabin with rocks in a field, the way Richard Gere and Brooke Adams mark out the outline of a boat on the prairie in Days of Heaven.
Bill Patton gives a third-person voiceover similar to that provided in the similarly Malickian The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford by Andrew Dominick. When Gladys and Robert have a child, it is filmed with the same wonder and intimacy as the baby Brad Pitt gets momentarily stumped by in The Tree of Life.
Suggested Reading
Will HAL kill Hollywood?
These comparisons are not in any way meant to take away from Bentley’s film, and again, Edgerton’s performance is formidable. (His Robert is a man of restraint but not repression; he’ll as likely chuckle as sob and his hands might be thick with scars, but his heart is open, even though he remains puzzled by the blows he has received.) Rather, the film’s indebtedness to Malick only shows what an important influence the director has.
Without Malick, there’s no Boyhood and no There Will Be Blood. His debut Badlands is a huge influence on Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides. Chloe Zhao is an affirmed fan and without the freer impressionistic editing of The Tree of Life, you wouldn’t have the complex and ambitious storytelling of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.
Sometimes an artist comes along and it’s as if they’ve added a new colour to the paintbox, or a new paintbox altogether. It’s wonderful to see it being taken to new places, forming new images. Train Dreams is a beautiful, moving film, as beguiling a vision as you get watching the dusk or the flames of a dying fire.
Train Dreams is streaming on Netflix. The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick by John Bleasdale is published by The University of Kentucky Press
Most popular
Cory Doctorow, the gatecrasher at the AI party
The fall of the (SS) United States
Everyone is addicted to everything
Nerd’s Eye View: 11 things you need to know about immigration
