Yes, I went to the Spectrum Theater to see “Train Dreams” the other night, but I attended with a heavy heart: The Delmar Dad’s Movie Club lasted exactly one year, and then, without warning, blew up spectacularly.
First, Jimmy broke up with us via text: “We did a year and it was good. But I’m not into continuing.”
Paul and I were shocked, I tell you, although maybe we shouldn’t have been. There have been warning signs. One of us has been shouldering the weight of a personal crisis and an ongoing dark night of the soul, of which I can speak no further, but only express my deepest sympathy.
“Train Dreams” was an apt choice as a film to see because it is poignant, beautiful, and tragic—perhaps like movie club itself. Based on a novella by the esteemed American writer Denis Johnson, the film is directed by Clint Bentley and stars Joel Edgerton as Robert Grainger, an early twentieth-century logger and railroad worker, in a birth-to-death character study displayed over a magnificent western forested landscape.
A loner, Robert meets the love of his life (the mesmerizing Felicty Jones), has a daughter, and tries to settle down, but his work keeps him far from home and his loving family. Logging is a dangerous gig, and he wrestles with a foreboding that something bad is going to happen, and sure enough it does, but not what Robert expects.
Just as I didn’t expect disaster to strike the movie club. After Jimmy dropped out just days before our scheduled night, Paul and I decided we would carry on as best we could without one of our founding members. We would regroup. We would work within our bylaws: it was Paul’s pick this month. He was the one who selected “Train Dreams.”
But then, at the eleventh hour, I get two texts from Paul, one after the other, like two shots ringing out in the night: “Hey. I woke up with a cold/sore throat. I am on the fence about tonight.” And shortly after, the knockout blow: “I am not gonna make it tonight.”
Oh, I took the news hard, even though Paul didn’t say he was dropping out of the club altogether. I texted back: “First Jimmy. Now you. I have been abandoned. Cast away. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
And go on I did, bravely. I went alone to see “Train Dreams.” I’m glad I did. It was a quiet and meditative film, the kind of rich, authentic character study that rarely gets made anymore. It was a movie about an honorable man struggling to be a man, and filled with lots of masculine motifs and themes.
The film wasn’t perfect. At the midpoint, when disaster strikes for Robert Grainger and he is thrown into a dungeon of grief, his character comes to a halt. It’s understandable to be paralyzed by heartache, but story demands change, and Robert neither descends further into darkness nor crawls much closer to the light for my taste, and so the last half seemed a little off, and one too many times I had to watch quick montages of Robert’s fonder memories as if I’d forgotten what ailed him, and I have a general mistrust of the montage technique because it’s often used as an emotional shortcut.
But that’s the film’s only minor flaw. It was excellent overall. And I’m proud that I pulled myself up by my bootstraps and braved the night alone, but I’m anxious that the ash heap of movie club may be upon us.
