By now, you have probably heard about Train Dreams. Since premiering this past January at Sundance, Clint Bentley’s adaptation of the Denis Johnson novella has been lauded by critics, screened at various film festivals, and purchased by Netflix. You may have heard that it is a magisterial, gorgeous, and quietly profound exploration of one man’s life in a period of change, indebted both to classic Western films and the canon of Terrence Malick. It’s possible you’ve heard that you really ought to have caught it in a movie theater to appreciate the majesty of Train Dreams.
At least I know I heard all that before I finally caught a screening last month at the Netflix-operated Paris Theater. Alongside a spotty crowd and at least one man in a flat cap, I endured 102 minutes of synthetic wonderment. I’m not sure I have ever seen such a loyal adaptation so completely miss the point of its material; even Noah Baumbach’s abominable White Noise understood to save his marital hang-ups for the very end. Bentley’s film aims to enfold you within the profundity of common experience, only to crush you beneath a redwood-scale slab of kitsch.
This might sound strange, as Trains Dreams the movie follows essentially the same arc as Train Dreams the book. We begin mid-stream, several decades into the life of a logger and railroad laborer named Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton). Grainier is an honest, taciturn man making a life with his wife Gladys (Felicity Jones) and infant daughter Kate in the woods of the Idaho panhandle. The course of his life, begun in the last years of the 19th century, will bring wars, deforestation, political and natural turmoil, though he will experience even the worst of it as a glancing blow.
Johnson’s novella is told out of order, beginning in the thick of Grainier’s life and then ranging around. There are chapters set in his childhood immediately adjacent to memories from old age, and seemingly future time will intrude suddenly into chapters set decades in the past. Bentley (minimally) mimics this through the use of Malickian montage, a run of roving, context-free images of forests, rivers, and nameless people. The rest of his film is largely linear and episodic, focusing first on Grainier’s work on the Spokane International Railway, then his time logging the old-growth forests of Washington, all tied together by Grainier’s quiet life with his daughter and wife, who, between trips away, nags him to settle down, invest his earnings, and start a farm.
Bentley, who adapted the screenplay for 2023’s Sing Sing, is clearly more comfortable with contained settings, and so he makes this sweeping story into a domestic one, the tale of a modest but beautiful love between individuals of no great note. When, at about the midpoint, Gladys and Kate are lost in a massive forest fire, the effect seems concentrated entirely around their tiny homestead. Whether from lack of vision or funds, Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar shrink their film to fit this manageable size, and lose much in the process.
To compensate, they incorporate plentiful voice-over narration, enlisting Will Patton to relay whole paragraphs of Johnson’s prose. Well, mostly. The version of Train Dreams presented here is a noticeably softer one. He has no unhealthy fascinations, no prejudices. A late section concerning a “season of lust” is cut entirely, to protect his hermetic image. Of the relations between Grainier and the Chinese railroad workers he toils alongside, we are told only that he did not particularly mind, one way or another.
This last change is the most explicit—and egregious—deviation from the book, which notably begins with “an attempt on the life of a Chinese laborer.” In Bentley’s film, Grainier is at work sawing a railroad tie when his coworker is grabbed by a group of men from the company. He hangs back, confused, calling out: “What did he do?” The Chinese man is thrown off the bridge, and for a time returns to Grainier as a ghost, a silent reminder of his guilty conscience. Meanwhile, Johnson clearly writes that Grainier “took part in” this attempted lynching, joining the group of his own free will, and holding on to the man when all the others want to give up. In any case, the laborer escapes, appearing to Grainier not as a judgmental spirit, but as the shadow of a potential assailant, come to take his revenge.
It's an obvious decision: Bentley does not want his protagonist to have taken part in a lynching, condemning him instead for his passivity. The film trims such snags throughout, turning the minor character of Kootenai Bob into Grainier’s best friend, a kindly indigenous man without even a name. Women are barely present in Johnson’s novella, and are rarely given much of interest to say or do. I could see why Jones would rather play a deeper intimacy between husband and wife, if only because it grants her any form of activity. Yet once again, this choice sentimentalizes and shrinks the story, transferring this quiet portrait of a largely wordless marriage into the zone of available domestic clichés.
These changes help to make Train Dreams into something palatable, a safe choice between seasons of Yellowstone. Johnson’s novella is full of strange and grotesque occurrences. It is a book full of ghosts and monsters, a story with space for spirit visitations and children literally raised by wolves. It includes a description of the world’s fattest man, an encounter with Elvis Presley, and a story told by a dying hobo who raped and impregnated his brother’s adolescent daughter. Bentley is unwilling to engage with any of this. A film imagined under the sign of Malick, it has little to no interest in spontaneity, or allowing discomfort and horror to undercut the wonder. Bentley is afraid that you will not love his characters—or his film—if they are too strange or ugly.
Then why did he want to adapt Denis Johnson? A writing prodigy with a crazy streak, he spent the first part of his life as a drug addict and dealer, stealing from friends, bumming off his genius, and acting like an all-around piece of shit. He reformed but never really repented, and went on to explore—or perhaps exploit—those lost years in a wildly uneven series of novels, novellas, and story collections. He wrote about CIA operatives, layabout drunks, grief-stricken professors, and car crash survivors, inflecting his stony, all-American sentences with flights of grotesque, even psychedelic wordplay.
These transcendental intrusions of mystery and extremity place Johnson far beyond the post-war canon and its WASPish cult of linguistic minimalism, as well as his many hardboiled Gen X imitators. He was a man who experienced and inflicted great ugliness, and his fiction does not hesitate to go there. During the attempted lynching that opens the book, the victim is described, several times, as a “Chinaman” who speaks in a “rapid singsong” and twists around “like a weasel in a sack.” His persecutors see him as scarcely human, and Johnson hews his prose to their point of view. In so doing, he aligns the reader with the group of white lynchers—including, yes, Grainier, who joins in without thinking and by the end is announcing: “I’ve got the bastard, and I’m your man!” Whatever guilt Grainier feels after the fact, he ascribes to the spell he believes he caught in that “gibberish” language he cannot understand. He does not regret taking part, but rather that they were not able to kill “that Chinaman before he’d cursed them.”
It makes for an uneasy, disquieting read. Like Grainier, we become parties to a lynching, articulated in a language that the mob would for the most part recognize. Like much else in Train Dreams, Johnson narrates this passage from a two-thirds remove, interpolating Grainier’s perspective without fully entering it, and it reveals our protagonist to be a man planted inescapably in his own time, without either the judgment or vindication that approach typically implies. Throughout the novel, we read about the good and bad moments of Grainier’s life, the brave and the cowardly actions he takes, arranged in the confused chronology of one man’s uncertain memory. There are no lessons here, and even moments of direct contact—as when he connects the attempted lynching with a childhood memory of the removal of the Chinese community from Fry, Montana—are not matters of moral revelation. They are simply the material of a life, overlapping individually but not definitively with the great currents of natural and human history.
Compare this with the climax of Bentley’s film, which transforms a relatively minor event from the book—a biplane ride—into a stunning vision of one man’s place within the web of being. “He felt, at last, connected to it all,” announces the narration, in words Johnson would never have written. In his book, Grainier catches a brief glimpse of his forgotten childhood, “and all the mysteries of this life were answered.” The line is perfect Johnson: seemingly direct, yet ultimately oblique. We do not learn the nature of these answers, and they change nothing for Grainier. He tumbles down off the plane, and spends the evening with an acquaintance who was “rolled by a whore,” and just gets on with his life.
It might sound like I’m nitpicking, perhaps even that I’ve missed the point. Bentley’s Train Dreams is not Johnson’s, nor should it necessarily be. Yet this insistence on ready-made profundity misses entirely the purpose of its source text. Grainier’s life is not a search for profundity, a grasping toward his place in the web of all things. He just lives it, intersecting with all manner of events big and small, alongside other people whose stories contain also some mixture of fate and contingency, and who will all be forgotten, whether they perish in a great fire or an accident in the woods. Whatever design knits them together, they will not know it.
Yet Bentley needs us to know it, to know he knows it too. If Train Dreams the book has the texture of an Andrew Wyeth, the human sweep of a Thomas Hart Benton, then Train Dreams the movie is like Thomas Kinkade: kitsch, pure and simple. Let it too be forgotten.
