Train Dreams is a folksy tale about an ordinary man and his ordinary life. It consists, accordingly, of folksy, ordinary images: trees, dogs, wives, sunsets, sad faces. This aesthetic might be for you; it isn’t for me. While I revere Malick’s The Tree of Life, its many knockoffs, like this film and 2020’s Nomadland, won’t touch their predecessor’s theological wrestling, so their cinematographies remain stubbornly themeless—nature anthologies without context, as if no one had ever seen a leaf before. The true precursor to Train Dreams may actually be Forrest Gump: its hero, Robert, is a simpleton, and the movie wants to confer mythic status on his simplicity, to honor it as a kind of forgotten, unappreciated wisdom. (This, really, is the premise of all things folk and country: that our problem is too much overthinking—that we’ve made life too dang complicated!) The corollary to this, though, is skepticism toward actual wisdom: the learned kind, the kind that can be articulated in words or even actions. Neither come easy to Robert, so we’re left only with the space to ponder life, not the tools to do so; the film is derelict in its responsibilities to us. A final montage reaches its grand statement: that the world is beautiful. Okay. Care to elaborate?
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