A Visual Feast

            One of the best films of the year came out on Netflix, and it was not Frankenstein. It was a much smaller scale movie called Train Dreams, and it was made by the same guys who made Sing Sing, which was one of my favorite films last year, so it makes sense that their follow up was equally as impressive, and hopefully they continue to pump out some amazing films.

            Train Dreams starts out in the late 1800s, Robert Grainer is a logger and railroad worker, and he marries Gladys. They are deeply in love, and they have a child. The problem is that Robert’s work is seasonal, so he must disappear for months at a time. So he misses months of his young child’s life so that he can provide for her. Of course, Robert and Gladys dream about starting their own business and having a better life, where he can stay home all the time, but it is a hard dream to bring to fruition.

            Then one day when Robert is returning from a tour of logging duty, he arrives to a smoky home. There is a vast forest fire. There is panic, and he is searching for his family, but he cannot find them in town. So he runs into the forest to search for them at his home, but it is too late. The house has burned down, and now Robert is left with nothing. He does not give up hope. He searches for his family continually, and he believes that maybe they escaped and are out there, and maybe one day they will return.

            Robert tries to log a little bit longer, but eventually his own age looks him in the face, and he is smart enough to know when to quit. For once, it seems he runs into a little luck, and he ends up with a carriage business. So now he gets to stay at home and interact with others. He works this and other odd jobs for his days trying to live the best life he can, but he never fully gives up on his family returning.

This was the best-looking movie of the year. From the start, I was encapsulated by the visuals that were put onto the screen. The opening shot of the railroad coming out of a tunnel with the mouth being a black silhouette on the edges and the center being filled with the blue sky and lush green forest, it was beautiful. It continues greatly from there. It feels like each shot was meticulously planned. The sun always seems to be in the perfect spot, it is as if they picked the exact moment each day to take the shot, and if the take did not go as planned, they would wait 24 hours and try again. (That is not what they did, but it is so expertly crafted that it feels that way.)

            Even the night shots were perfectly lit. The flames from the fires keeping them warm are constantly glowing off their faces. The way it looks gives it so much added emotion. Then when it is not dark, there are so many conversations at twilight. The sun is setting, and fiery colors are painting the sky as the backdrop to these emotional conversations. There are also stills that look like they belong in a museum, and there is even a shot, where the camera is strapped to the tree, and they cut the tree down, and the camera goes with it. It was a unique shot.

            What makes this all the more tragic is that this was a Netflix release. There was supposedly a small theatrical run, but even the people from the movie podcast I listen to said they had to see it at home, and usually sense they live in LA, they get to see everything in theaters, even Netflix releases, so I do not know where they theatrically released this film. It would have been perfect to see in a theater. Although it was filmed digitally, and this would have looked great on film. The added graininess would have done great considering the period in which this film took place, the late 1800s to the mid-1900s.

            This is going to be a weird comparison, but this movie reminds me of Interstellar. I know the setting of these two films is completely different, Train Dreams takes place in a time when landing on the moon would be an amazing achievement, and Interstellar has interplanetary travel, but they share a same melancholic theme.

The loss of time with loved ones. Each year, Robert would go out to log and work on the railroad. This meant that he was leaving his family for months at a time, then he would come back, and his daughter would seem so much older, and he felt like he was missing so much. It reminded me of the scene in Interstellar when Cooper starts to watch the messages his family sent him while he was gone, and he just sees all that he missed because he left to go to space. These two were literally worlds apart, but they experienced the same emotion of loss.

This is also a movie about hope. Obviously, he has hope that maybe he did not lose his family in the fire, and that they will return one day, but before that he also had hopes and dreams. When he would talk to his wife about buying more land, and an animal to help them plow, so that they could turn their home into a farm, but they needed a loan. When you have a loved one, it is so easy to dream and think about how life can be. I am sure people of the lowest incomes do it and even people with higher incomes do it. There is always the dream that maybe if we do this, THEN everything will be perfect for us and our family.

Although based off of research I have read, it always ends up being that way. Even if you end up getting that raise you think you need or the house you think you want, it still ends up being, well what if we had a little bit more. It is human nature to always want more, but in the case of Robert and Gladys, it hurts even more because they lose the chance to bring those dreams to reality. They lose the chance to continually want more. Robert goes on another logging trip, and he comes back to nothing.

After the loss, Robert is initially distraught, and who would not be? He is literally sleeping on the burnt ground where his house used to be. But once prodded a little bit, he pulls it together. He sees what else in the world. It is not a perfect life by any means, but he makes a living. There is still a lot of life left for Robert in the movie as we follow him after the tragedy. He logs for a little bit, he becomes a stagecoach driver for a big part of it, and finally we see him take a plane ride towards the end of his life before we learn of his passing.

In this time, we learn of him taking a lady out to a fire tower, and it makes you think, maybe he will find love again with someone else that has experienced loss. He takes her out there, and he comes out again and visits her, but nothing ever happens, he just keeps living his life. Although it seems so simple, as the movie progresses, the emotion just seems to build and build, so by the end, when they said that he died, I cried.

So if you are looking for a great emotional movie to watch with your family for Thanksgiving, this would be the one. It is slow moving, but it is stunning in its beauty, so even if you do not like slow stories, you can be distracted by the visuals. Of course, for a movie to be this emotional, it also has to have great acting as well. I currently have this movie as number two for the year, better than Sinners and better than One Battle After Another. Sadly, this one is more readily available, and you can just fire it up on Netflix. I highly recommend it. 4.5 Stars.