Train Dreams

Joel Edgerton

The duo of Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar, the team behind Sing Sing, should be congratulated for having the good taste and gumption to adapt Denis Johnson's Train Dreams.

Johnson's novella, which chronicles the life of logger and homesteader Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) in the Idaho panhandle during the early years of the twentieth century, is his most beautifully written book, a landmark of 21st century American fiction. The film adaption is handsomely mounted, boasting gorgeous cinematography by Adolpho Veloso. I also enjoyed the narration by Will Patton which hews closely to Johnson's prose. Edgerton is well cast and effective as the taciturn Grainier. John Diehl and Paul Schneider contribute effective supporting turns. However, on the whole, I found this adaptation to be overly decorous. The changes made by Bentley and Kwedar to the material domesticates and softens it, neutering the film's impact.

I do not believe a film adaptation has to hew exactly to its source. However, in judging a film adaptation, comparing a film to its source displays the filmmakers choices for good and ill. The film virtually eliminate the book's vein of black humor. The film expands the roles of Grainier's wife Gladys, Claire Thompson, and storekeeper Ignatius Jack. This greatly increases the interactions Robert has with humans, but defeats one of the chief purposes of the book: to portray the life of a hermit who largely turns his back on mankind to live both within and against nature. However, nature in the film is not as fierce as that in the book. The hardships and loneliness of frontier life are watered down in the film. The costumes and sets are too tidy and clean. The homestead that Edgerton and his missus (a wan Felicity Jones) live in resembles a glamping cabin in a Magnolia magazine photo shoot. Likewise, the physical toll that logging takes on Grainier is deemphasized. The book goes into greater detail in picturing the dangers of logging. When the film shows the tragic mishaps that befall loggers, one resulting in the death of a key supporting character, the results are so tossed off that they have little visceral effect.

The film suffers from contemporary virtue signaling. In both the book and film, Grainier is haunted by the murder of a Chinese rail worker. However, in the book, Grainier is much more culpable for his role in the crime. Likewise, the book truncates the scene where Grainier, as a boy, encounters a dying man named William Coswell Haley. Haley's monologue is one of the novella's highlights, but I can understand excising it in an adaptation. However, the version the film provides eliminates the reason the moment haunts Grainier for the rest of his life. In the book, Grainier is so stunned by his predicament that he ignores the dying man's last request for a drink of water, a request he honors in the movie. These changes make Grainier more of a heroic protagonist, but less of an interesting and believable character. Finally, I thought the adaptation loses something by lessening the presence of wolves in the film. This not only eliminates the theme of an atavistic bond between the protagonist and nature, but renders the reappearance of a major character late in the film nonsensical. If you've never read Train Dreams, the film retains enough of the book's qualities to please the uninitiated, but I was disappointed.