Two voices hold director Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams together like a duet, and you hear the first before the film has even begun. It’s the forest itself. As the credits roll, wind ruffles through trees, there’s birdsong, the drum and pock of a woodpecker. Then Will Patton’s voice begins with its oaken intimacies, speaking low. He plays a nameless narrator, maybe God. “There were once passageways to the old world, strange trails, hidden paths. You’d turn a corner and suddenly find yourself face-to-face with the great mystery, the foundation of all things.”
The film and the Denis Johnson novella on which it’s based tell the story of Robert Grainier, a simple man from Bonners Ferry, Idaho, who seems always on the cusp of understanding this great mystery. When we first see him, Grainier, played with mournful quietude by Joel Edgerton, is gripping the right end of a huge saw, cutting up a tree that we’ve just watched felled from its point of view, a signal of where this film is headed in its story of a traveling logger and the curse his life seems to fall under.
Or maybe that’s just the life of a logger in the early 20th century—it was, after all, extremely dangerous work. Johnson’s novella, a version of which was first published in the Paris Review in 2002, features some of the most exquisite writing in American literature on the brutality and intimacy of logging. The way even a great sawyer might misjudge a cut and cause the death of a whole crew or the horses then used to drag the trees out of the forest.
With Train Dreams, Bentley and his cinematographer, Adolpho Veloso, who also worked with him on Jockey, their 2021 film about horse racing, have created a spooky and magisterial movie that steps into this danger and asks the same spiritual and moral questions posed in Johnson’s novella. In many of the shots where Grainier is in the woods, he’s rendered tiny by the trees, the grandeur of the forest, and also the scale of destruction undertaken by the railroads and logging companies as they rip up mountain after mountain of hundred-year-old spruce, Douglas fir, and pine.
This old world is brought back with a sure cinematographer’s hand. In a gauzy flashback, Grainier is shown arriving in Fry, Idaho, as a child without parents, already drifting like a leaf on a stream. Within 30 seconds, the film has dispatched his childhood, beautifully depicted as a series of montage shots—a boy with a two-headed calf in a barn, a huge fish hoisted out of a lake and hauled to shore. As a young teenager, he encounters a man robbed and knifed and dying by rot on the forest floor. Grainier is a dreamer, but he knows that if he takes his attention off the world around him, the effects might be fatal. Before long, he is heading off to the woods to begin his career as a logger.
Love falls into Grainier’s life with equal speed when a woman named Gladys introduces herself after church. Played by Felicity Jones, Gladys is all wide-mouthed curiosity and Patsy Cline twang. She knows what she wants, which is Grainier. Rushed courtships and marriages in film can have the too-sweet inevitability of a country music ballad, but Bentley shoots these scenes with such tenderness and discretion that one almost wants to look away. Later, when Grainier and Gladys make love, it’s shot in such close-up that the audience can’t see their bodies, as if what’s happening is between them, not something that ought to be seen.
Even if these scenes are occasionally too amber-lit at the edges and the lovely score by Bryce Dessner and Nick Cave plays too often, they explain why a man like Grainier—who has the capacity for wonder—would go back to the woods. He needs to earn money to support his family. But every living thing wants to live, too. This awareness, the sense the forest was fighting back, comes in earlier in Johnson’s book. “It was only when you left it alone that a tree might treat you as a friend,” he writes. “After the blade bit in, you had yourself a war.” Bentley and his co-screenwriter, Greg Kwedar, put these words into the mouth of an aging logger after one of the film’s great side characters, Arn Peeples, played with fireside intensity and vulnerability by William H. Macy, is killed by a falling branch.
Bentley and Kwedar have done a supremely good job of capturing the domestic cost of America’s imperial rise and the violence it took by placing key details in small moments and passing conversation. And when they have to draw out the themes of the book, the lines feel so natural, as if written by Johnson himself. Not long before Peeples is killed, he and Grainier are trying to sleep in side-by-side tents, which we are told date back to the Civil War and Indian campaigns. Grainier asks, “Arn, do you…do you think that the bad things that we do follow us through life?”
Grainier has reason to ask this question. Working on a bridge crew, he stands by as some of his coworkers physically lift and toss a Chinese coworker off the bridge to his death. Grainier briefly holds the man’s leg; it’s not clear if he’s trying to help him escape or aid the other loggers in the lynching. The novelist Carlos Bulosan, who came to America in 1930 from the Philippines, described similar murders taking place in California. “Everywhere I went I saw white men attacking Filipinos.”
In Train Dreams, the ghost of the murdered man haunts Grainier through his life. Played by Alfred Hsing, the man appears in Grainier’s dreams, and in some extreme moments appears to be sitting beside him. Dream sequences are so often botched in film, but Bentley handles them brilliantly, building a sense of dread that the actions of Grainier’s past will come up and extract a dear price.
Soon enough, the price comes in the form of a great fire that descends on Bonners Ferry with ferocity and takes everything—including Grainier’s farm, his wife, and his daughter. The event is clearly based on the 1910 fire known as the Big Burn, which swept through northern Idaho and Montana, consuming some three million acres and developing hurricane-force winds that ripped centuries-old trees straight from the ground. In his book The Big Burn, Timothy Egan describes how at its peak the fire moved “faster than a horse could run.”
’Tis the season for inferno films, with The Lost Bus (read Alta’s review) and Rebuilding, plus Ron Howard’s upcoming film about a firefighter that will star Glen Powell. Train Dreams is the first film I’ve ever seen that doesn’t cast humans as heroes in a conflagration, nor does it focus on the firefighting effort. Instead, it shows the lives of people in the industries—logging and railroading, which surely contributed to one of the worst fires in American history.
Johnson spent decades of his life in Bonners Ferry, right up against the river that was like a northern border to the fire that shaped the landscape, and the destruction of which kicked off a policy of universal fire suppression. He knew this land, cared for it, and understood the folly at the heart of its preservation. By 1935, after the Big Burn and other terrible fires, the Forest Service adopted the 10 a.m. policy that required that all wildfires be put out by the morning after their beginning. It sounds sensible, but it led to a huge buildup of undergrowth, something Indigenous people have addressed with controlled burns, a form of stewardship practiced for generations. Climate change and undergrowth excess have led to the enormous fires of today. For once, we have a film that tells us—gently but clearly—where that story began and why, and it sets within that tale a parable of stark emotional power, in which the voices speaking are not just those of humans. If only we had listened.•
John Freeman is the host of the California Book Club and the author of California Rewritten, among other books. He is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story and an executive editor at Knopf. He lives in New York.
