In a rare interview in 1979, the director Terrence Malick declared, with lamentation and hope:
We live in such dark times and we have gradually lost our open spaces. …Wilderness, this is the place where solidarity exists, and justice, where the virtues are somehow linked to his justice. …This sense of space disappearing, we nevertheless can find it in cinema, which will pass it on to us. …For an hour, or for two days, these films can enable small changes of heart, changes that mean the same thing: to live better and to love more.
47 years later and cinema is dying.
Since the close of the frontier, any American of conscience has mourned that loss of “open spaces” and hoped something might replace them. The record thus far shows none can. At least none that won’t likewise fade.
But what else can you do when you’ve lost something? Keep moving forward, they say. But what if you don’t? Why not stay put? You won’t find it there, they reply. But will you find it wherever “forward” is? No, they’ll have to admit.
Train Dreams, one of the last gasps of a dying cinema, dares to sing—and it does sing—about a man, Robert Grainier, who decides to stay put. It’s the opposite of most stories, in which a man loses his loves and goes on a quest to find them, thus satisfying the need they have to keep moving forward. Instead, Grainier travels, comes back home, loses his loves, and remains right where he is, waiting for them to return.
They won’t.
His life passes, as the world passes him by. He rides into town sometimes but always comes back to this cabin. He had been an itinerant logger, cutting down forests he loves and lives in to build railroads that would replace the wagon taxi he would eventually drive for a living. A few years later, the railroads would be replaced by highways. He remembers everything he loves and has lost. He’ll die alone, as you and I will. Obsolescence is the rule, even over the life of man, it seems.
But it only seems so.
I cannot describe the plot any further. It’s one of the best films of the decade. But it isn’t about the plot. It isn’t about the character development. It isn’t in the script, nor is it even in the cinematography. It is as if in a whisper which speaks to your heart. If you see this film and can’t hear it, I can’t help you. I can only say that this film helped me “to live better and to love more.”
What follows, then, is a review not of the film but only of some “small changes of heart” that followed my encounter with it:
I wanted to hug my daughter. I should watch her smile more. In the film, a daughter drops a bowl in a stream and lets it go. I should laugh when my daughter does such things.
I wanted to pray more. To ask God why we must change so much. Why can’t we see the glory? “Beautiful ain’t it?” A dying man in the film says. “What is?” Robert asks. “All of it,” he replies. Now I look around more often.
I wanted to travel less and stay home more. Never to leave my family’s side.
I wanted to go out West to the great forests of Washington, Oregon, maybe Idaho. “…the place where solidarity exists, and justice, where the virtues are somehow linked to this justice…”
These sentiments contradict. But they are united by desire to be with beauty, with beautiful people and things. Maybe that’s a lesson for other parts of life too.
I wanted to hear the birds call. How many songs have I ignored?
I wanted to clean my boots. I’ve had this pair of Iron Rangers for almost ten years. I clean them once a year and they look good as new. I’ve worn them hiking and the result is the same. Some things, even artificial things, stand the test of time better than others, and I should cherish them.
I wanted to remember people who have been forgotten. Many people have been forgotten. In the film, one man prophesies that “bad men are raised up and good men fall to their knees.” Later, a good man falls to his knees. He’d spent a long time wondering if he is a good man. I’ve spent a long time wondering if I’m a good man. I still don’t know but now I know it’s better to remember other good men, especially the ones who stayed put and whom everyone else forgot.
These changes of heart may seem for the reader unrelated to each other. But they are bound together in the story of Train Dreams. The story unifies. But it is a story that can only be seen for yourself. And then you have to go live that story for yourself. And you will live that story, whether you know it or not.
Train Dreams is the story of a man who travels, who stays put, who witnesses and who remembers, who lives and dies. The man who stays put, in whatever form of protest or passivity, against the passage of time is vindicated by the story. If he dies alone, ignored by all, then he is recognized by the witness—his viewers, readers, and listeners. If the rest will forget him, then we his witnesses will not.
And yet this vindication depends upon our remembering, our refusal to forget those who have been forgotten, and our commitment to keep telling the story. And one day, we too will fail. We will forget, even as we are forgotten, passing into that final end of our time and all time.
The victory of those made obsolete by time rests, finally, on the Witness beyond the witnesses. He who knows the sparrows falling to the ground. Who raises a man from the dead.
Image Credit: Theodore Robinson, “The Valley of Arconville” (c. 1887) via The Art Institute of Chicago.
