Why Dream Train Should Win the Best Picture Oscar | film

TArguably the least-known film of all the Oscar Best Picture nominees, Rain Dreams could have easily passed me by, destined to instead get lost in Netflix’s sprawling library, if not for a phone call to a friend last year. She had just seen one of last year’s big films — one that had big names, a lot of hype, and was expected to generate a lot of controversy — and she came away feeling hopeless about that film, as well as the state of cinema. It was a film that, like many films I’ve seen recently, contained only empty, worthless provocations. “I don’t want to sound corny,” she said, “but I think it was all better in the ’70s!” Train Dreams was one of the few films of the year that I enjoyed.

So I came to Train Dreams, Clint Bentley’s adaptation of Dennis Johnson’s novella, with this idea in mind: that it was something that was both out of touch with our times and perhaps better for it, too. Immediately, his use of a gentle-voiced, omniscient narrator recalled late-twentieth-century Hollywood classics. The Voice of God transports us to Bonners Ferry, Idaho, in the early 1900s, and into the life of Robert Grenier (Joel Edgerton), a man who drifts through the first two decades of his life without much purpose before falling in love with the free-spirited Gladys (Felicity Jones).

I’ve been watching many modern films with fast cuts, frenetic pacing, and energetic music, so I was struck by the meditative pace of Train Dreams — it has been compared to the films of Terrence Malick — with soothing music by the National’s Bryce Dessner. To support Gladys and their new daughter, Katie, Robert takes a job as a woodcutter, moving around with itinerant men, including the wonderful William H. Macy as Arn, the talkative explosives expert. Adolfo Veloso’s cinematography here is a joy to behold, stretching across the verdant landscape as Robert and his fellow loggers take in the breathtaking views and majestic trees falling wild.

What also makes Train Dreams seem outdated is its sincere concern with moral questions, which seems out of step with our era of rampant villainy. While working on the railway, Robert witnesses the murder of his Chinese colleague and friend Fu Sheng in what is presumed to be a racist attack, given the film’s nods to Chinese exclusion laws. Robert, watching resignedly, is soon haunted by his actions. “Do the bad things we do follow us throughout life?” Arn later asked. Arn isn’t so sure about karmic justice—”I’ve seen bad men rise up and good men brought to their knees”—but he still believes that our choices leave an indelible mark. “We just cut down trees that have been here for 500 years,” he tells his colleagues. “It disturbs a man’s soul whether you know him or not.”

That we should be concerned with matters of good and evil as they relate to our souls: what a novel idea for some of the most powerful people in the world today! In less lofty realms, there’s also something poignant about the film’s character study of Robert, a lost man haunted by his own failures, who spends his life waiting for a big discovery that never seems to arrive, and only begins to have “a dim understanding of his life” by the time it begins to “slide away from it.”

This line made me think of one scene in the movie where we watch two people having a conversation from above. It was as if we were looking at humanity from the point of view of these ancient trees: below, humans were like little ants wandering around us, trying to make sense of their limited time here.