Train Dreams

⭐ 8.5/10

In this movie Joel Edgerton is a brooding guy who cuts down trees and is lonely and sad, except when he gets precious moments with his wife and kid. That, plus the beautiful cinematography, are all you need for this to be a great movie. It looks stunning, and every time a tree came down it looked more beautiful than the last time. I thought the first 45 minutes or so were perfect, this hard man living a hard life trying to build a family.

It had me thinking of There Will Be Blood, a depiction of the blooming of American industry, but this being forestry instead of oil. Where Daniel Plainview 100% capitalist,  Edgerton's character is just working to provide for his family. There is a sadness in the way these trees come down, although it might be me reflecting his mood over it. There is this poignant scene where he is on a train many years later, and he goes past one of the railways he helped to build that is no longer in use, and that was the feeling this movie left me with. Pillaging the earth, men dying, all to feed industry for a tiny amount of time. The William H. Macy character completely embodies this, and I think his stretch is the best part of the movie, as he vocalizes his thoughts on the impact of what they are doing.

This all resonated with me, as the past couple years my own work has started to feel a bit like a grind, and the impact of what I am doing, or at least the field I work in, is increasingly net negative for the world. There is this thing in programming where coders celebrate deleting code, because that either means the product has gotten so good you don't need it, or its been replaced, or it was bad and never used in the first place. Watching him on that train as an old man I couldn't help but think about my last decade of work being deleted in a keystroke one day, with no thought to whatever artfulness or care went in to it. Others will celebrate the progress, I will wonder what it was all for.

The movie takes a turn half way through, and it lost me a bit after that. The sadness is amplified, but I think I may have been protecting myself by not giving in to it, given that I was holding my baby daughter for most of this movie. There is a scene late where he has a conversation with another woman that shows up, and it just felt very out of place, this guy giving a bit of a thesis statement on his life. That felt like part of a lesser movie. The ending had some ideas I am still mulling over, just not really a conclusion that matched what I loved about the start of this movie.

Congrats to Netflix for putting out something with tremendous craft and visual style. Hopefully a bunch of people watch this.