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.

Petrov's Flu

Semyon Serzin

Kirill Serebrennikov's Petrov's Flu is the most inspired Russian film I've seen since Beanpole. Released in Russia in 2021, the film is an adaptation of Alexey Salnikov's novel Petrov In and Around the Flu, a better title but one that does not fit snugly on a marquee. Salinikov has written a number of novels, but none have been translated into English. Both film and book center around Petrov (Semyon Serzin), a cartoonist who lives in the southeastern Russian city of Yekaterinburg. The film is mostly set in 2003 or so, but the film flits back and forth in time and space. We see the childhood memories of Petrov's, but also his fantasies and those of his estranged wife, Nurlinsa (Chulpan Khamatova). Nurlinsa's fantasies are chiefly the grisly kind, but are of a piece with the very dark and Russian humor of the film. 

We first meet Petrov on a grim and crowded bus during Christmas time. The garish ticket taker is done up seasonably as the Snow Queen, which we will soon learn is a link to Petrov's childhood memories. The central motif of the film is sickness. Petrov is coughing and hacking on the bus and throughout the film. The child he shares with Nurlinsa is also badly ill with the flu, worrying the couple to no good end. The film invokes this by shooting the 2003 sequences in a blue green blear, as if sickness permeates the land. Sickness is a common motif in Russian literature, most prominently in Dostoyevsky where the ills of crowded urban centers infect the populace. All this miasmic swampiness might get tedious, but the film shifts gears half way through and we witness the back story of a woman named Marina (Yulia Peresild) who played the Snow Queen in a holiday pageant that Petrov witnessed in 1971. These are shot in crisp black and white and include Marina's fantasies of what the objects of her desire look like naked. Other repeated motifs in the film are those of UFOs and the Soviet space program, the former suggesting a desire to escape the homeland and the latter a reminder of the faded glory of the USSR.

Petrov's Flu is going to be too much for some people at a nearly two and a half hour length. I found the animation sequence disappointing and would have pruned some of the tedious arguments between Petrov's parents. However, I was stunned by the invention displayed by Serebrennikov in the film's many transitions from consciousness into unconsciousness. Though it is extremely disjunctive and digressive, Petrov's Flu unspools relatively seamlessly. I was caught up in the film's momentum all through the film and loved the entire cast, including supporting performance by Yuri Kolokolnikov as the twisted Hades and Aleksandr Aleksandrovich as Marina's drunken, but philosophical brother. An imaginative treat for mature viewers.

Chulpan Khamatova X2

 

Ivan's Childhood

Nickolai Burlyayev and Evgeny Zharikov

Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood, from 1962, is a striking debut feature. The film is set, primarily, in the western USSR during World War 2. The main character is a twelve year old orphan who seeks vengeance against the invading Germans by joining the partisans. His thirst for revenge is so great that he has escaped a boarding school he was put into to serve at the front. The film shifts back and forth between Ivan's experiences during the war contrasted with memories, dreams, and reflections of Ivan's peaceful and pastorale past. 

The landscape of the warfront is ravaged and macabre, an alienated environment. Ivan's Childhood has some of the standard elements of a Soviet film about what they still call The Great Patriotic War, but films by Tarkovsky look like no other. The full panoply of nature is always on display: from fertility to destruction, but shot as if by a metaphysical poet. Tarkovsky and cinematographer Vadim Yusov's compositions are always beautiful, but they are also disorienting. The vastness of the natural world, whether on earth or in space, is overwhelming for his characters. The images in Ivan's Childhood, whether they be of a crashed plane or a truck hauling apples in the rain. are defamiliarized. Tarkovsky's style is similar to the concept of Ostranenie or "making strange", as coined by Victor Shklovsky. The palpable textures of the imagery in Ivan's Childhood follow Shklovsky's dictum that in art "a stone must be stony."

Burlyayev and Irma Raush

Alas, film is more than the sum of its images, for some elements of the film's screenplay succumb to trite cliches. The barely sketched love triangle feels more like a commercial concession than a necessary element. Also, Ivan's devotion to the cause feels too super human. It is this element that led Jonas Mekas to denounce the flick in the Village Voice as "a fascist movie." Now Mekas, who was born in Lithuania and was imprisoned by the Nazis for his troubles, may have been overly sensitive when he encountered propaganda produced in countries headed by authoritarian regimes, but that was his right. Ivan's Childhood originated as a short story by Vladimir Bogomolov. It went through many iterations on its way to the big screen. Bogomolov was involved at every stage and there was much wrangling over the scenario. Future filmmaker Andrei Konchalovsky, who plays a bespectacled soldier, was one of the many credited and uncredited screenwriters.

                                                               Spoiler Alert

The prime bone of contention during production was over the film's ending and I admit I have some misgiving over the final sequence. In the original story, Ivan survives the war. In the film, a Lieutenant who had befriended him finds his file, which indicates Ivan has been executed for being a partisan, while rummaging through the Nazi chancellory in defeated Berlin. Afterwards, we are treated to shots of torture devices used by the Gestapo. Shots from Soviet documentary units of Berlin in ruins feel tacked on as does ghoulish footage of the charred remains of Joseph Goebbels and the corpses of his children, poisoned by Goebbels and his Frau. It didn't sit well with me and I imagine the same was true with Mr. Mekas. Still, Ivan's Childhood has many moments that foretell an extraordinary career from Tarkovsky.

The actor who played Ivan, Nickolai Burlyayev, has subsequently had a successful film and political career. He was at one time married to Natalya Bondarchuk, daughter of Sergei Bondarchuk and Inna Makarova. After publicly supporting Russia's incursion into Ukraine in 2014, he successfully ran for the Duma in 2020. He has described himself as Orthodox and a homophobe. He has been sanctioned by both the UK government and the US treasury. Making strange indeed.