Train Dreams is a melancholy tale about an ordinary man and his ordinary life. Trees, dogs, wives, sunsets, sad faces—there’s your movie. Terrance Malick’s The Tree of Life is the model, but that film is tied together by complex theological wrestling; this and other Malick knockoffs, like 2020’s Nomadland, won’t touch that aspect, so their images remain stubbornly themeless: with no unifying philosophical core, shots of leaves are—just leaves. And there are a lot of leaves in this movie. A more apt comparison, then, may be Forrest Gump: the hero is a simpleton, and the movie wants to confer mythic status on his simplicity, to honor it as a forgotten, unappreciated wisdom; as with all things folksy, overthinking is the enemy—we’ve made life too dang complicated! The corollary to this worldview, though, and its fatal weakness in the age of technology, 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 with only the space to ponder life, not the tools to do so; the movie is derelict in its responsibilities. Its one insight—which arrives, like everything in this film, through narration, not organic depiction—is that the world is beautiful. Granted. What else ya got?
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