“In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed; Then he openeth the ears of men, and sealeth their instruction.” -Job 33:15-16.
Speaking of childhood in Denis Johnson’s source novella, Robert Grainier (brought here to wounded life by Joel Edgerton) said that “the whole adventure made him forget things as soon as they happened.” It’s so much like a ride on a train which impossibly rips through time and space; the now windowed world feeding our prefrontal what the neocortex would love to dine on. The passenger and prophet is held hostage on pre-laid tracks–some perhaps he helped to lay–and left to mutely marvel at the determinate path he is on. Could he have changed it?
He dialogues with the facts of his tangential culpability in a Chinese co-laborer’s death. He slumps over at the memory of abandoning a dying man at his dying wish. But most of all, he agonizes and retreats deeper into himself at the ghosts of his wife Gladys (Felicity Jones) and of Kate; his fair-haired daughter, only ‘yay high.’ Particularly in this final matter, Grainier believes that the punishment is too great. But suppose it isn’t a punishment at all, but a warning? Job was called a perfect man and he lost as much. Why again these dreams? “That he may withdraw man from his purpose, and hide pride from man. He keepeth back his soul from the pit, and his life from perishing by the sword.” (Job 33:17-18).
Grainier’s innocence is not hagiographic, but childlike; as all en route to the Kingdom must be. He doesn’t receive as provocation the theologically thorny observation of a passenger for his taxi business (Kerry Condon) that “all those different religions all over the world” are just the “same story, different slants.” Neither does he become carried away with zeal in community worship. Instead: “He forgot he was a sad man. When the hymns began, he remembered.” (The hymn chosen for the film, “Through the love of God our savior, all will be well…”). The lusty local theater beckons him in, and when he refuses he hasn’t the catharsis to know if he’s “saved himself or deprived himself.”
Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams is a portrait of a man who saw the world incomprehensibly change. But when he passed “he was never missed.” Even still, “the Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit” (Ps. 34:18). Mortality and suffering seem indiscriminate, but they are lovingly woven through this, the best of all possible realities. Will Patton (ordained to cinematic ministry by 2020’s Minari) provides resonant narration for Grainier’s eight decade plod through the liminal landscape between waking and sleeping; life and death. Nick Cave elegizes him (in what’s arguably the superior adaptation) in a transcendently philosophical ballad about the inexplicable connection between the ‘now’ and ‘not yet.’
“Now he slept soundly through the nights, and often he dreamed of trains…”
What does it mean to start sleeping again? My God. After everything? Is there one thing left for the seared conscience? One intermittent poetry for the rumbling spirit? “Trains and the choirs of distant wolves” and the “mad jibbering of coyotes…surrounded by thunder…and all the mysteries of this life…the original ideal of all such sounds ever made, of the foghorn and the ship’s horn, the locomotive’s lonesome whistle…the music of bagpipes” all followed by sudden blackness and time forever gone. Every lily clothed and every sparrow fed without us ever having known how much we needed that hermit in the woods for our eyes and ears glued to the preacher in the pulpit. — Mitch Capps (2025)
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