Train Dreams

There’s a scene I often return to in Apur Sansar (1959), the third in Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, that’s an eloquent defence of ordinariness. Apu (Soumitra Chatterjee) is being gently pulled up by a friend for his lack of ambition. He ventures that he’s writing a novel, and starts narrating the story: a boy grows up in the village, moves to the city, studies hard. “We feel he has in him seeds of greatness, but…” “He doesn’t succeed?” the friend guesses. “He doesn’t,” Apu replies. “But to him this isn’t a tragedy. He realises one must face reality. One must live!” Robert Grainier wouldn’t be able to articulate this, but he’d agree. He’s a young orphan at the start of Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, in a tiny town in rural Idaho. “He quit attending school in his early teens, and the next two decades passed without much direction or purpose,” the voiceover says. He becomes a logger, and though he works a few other jobs, that’s the only real profession he has. He’s in his 80s when the film closes, and has lived most of his life in the same small town.

In Train Dreams, life is but an accruement of endings. Based on Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella, Clint Bentley’s tender fever-dream of a film is rooted in the anonymity of time: an anti-Forrest Gump of sorts. It’s about the kind of man that history is wired to forget: a humble woodlogger and railroad construction worker, a normal husband and father, a survivor and soliloquy, a grafter and griever. A voice-over introduces Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) as an orphan in his childhood; it closes with him at 80, having lived and loved and lost and lived in the shadow of loss. He is a reluctant protagonist masquerading as just another person. It’s almost as if the story keeps leaving him behind in the hope that he will catch up.

It takes a special kind of film to be aware of its surroundings. It is one thing to fetishise nature and invite comparison to the sweeping scale of a Terrence Mallick film but Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams does something interesting with the vessel of a meandering Mallick film. It cuts and splices the essential bits of a man’s journey fuelled by cosmic wonder: the meaning of it all. And it does that using a specific means: a voiceover (by Will Patton).