3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Train Dreams

2025, Clint Bentley (Jockey) -- Netflix

Stubbing this out, even though I have not yet finished the movie, as the voice of it has sent me down a rabbit hole for the adapted novella's author, one Denis Johnson. I read mostly pulp fiction: scifi and fantasy and horror and crime. Rarely do these works have a "voice" but I just absorbed Johnson's "Car Crash While Hitchhiking" and its nothing but voice, as strong and clear as Will Patton's narration of the Bentley film. I imagine the film director felt it was necessary to capture the author's voice, as while I imagine the soul & plot has been captured in the movie, all too often the author themself is absent from the medium.

This was a sad movie, but not in a bad way. To misquote Kent, the movie is "contemplative & meditative." It chronicles the life of an average man, not a simple man, but also one not complicated by intricacies. He was a loner, often lonely, but not an unfriendly man, dismissive of company. He was a logger, but much of the life portrayed he is apart from that. His life has poignant tragedies, but what life doesn't. Robert Granier (Joel Edgerton, It Comes At Night) was just a man who lived through better part of the 20th century, observing civilization grow up around to him, connected by train tracks and technology, but despite his contributions, never really became a part of it.

I am going to have to let the movie settle into my brain pan for a while, before I complete this. Later. Unfortunately, doing that let all the storied thoughts in my brain seep out. I have to say, it had a great impact on my while watching, and in the days not long after, but... now, its mostly gone. I won't let that judge my fondness for the movie. I suspect that in watching the movie, and in reading a bit of Johnson afterwards, I found another place in my mind, one I don't often travel to anymore. And I left the memory of that movie there, when I returned to the anxiety & stress of my real world.

I came at this movie thinking it was going to be about trains and about trees, and about a great tragedy. But while it is about these, they are not its core. The train trips are linkages, the trees are ever present, as Robert only leaves the forest once, late in life. The tragedy is great, very great, perhaps the greatest impact on his life, but its not the only impact the movie portrays. In fact it begins with an injustice, a short scene where European railway workers murder a Chinese worker, and Robert does not stop it; the scene leaving us to wonder, was he about to help the killers? This act haunts him, literally, forever. 

Its hard to relate this movie by its plot, by its story, because that is not what it is about. Already adapted from condensed source material, the novella, it is not seeking narrative arcs. More, its giving us a mood through translation of words to screen, sometimes helped along by Will Patton's voice-overs, an actor already know for reading Johnson's voice. In some ways, I drawn to this by it being akin to the vignettes I write, small condensed images in hand-written word, nary a plot to be found. Being formed around Johnson's beautiful prose, Bentley creates his own beautiful imagery in sunlight, in shadows among trees, in steam & smoke, in people's faces. 

One of the strongest things from the movie that stayed with me, are the images of Robert's musings. He is often lost in thought, staring out at the world, not really part of it. He is re-playing times, voices, images from his past constantly. Robert is a man of many thoughts, but few words. I think that is where the train dreams come from, because like myself, when he is forced to a time period when all he can do is think, sitting in his seat, watching the world pass by outside the window, he slips into a dream like state, of ponderances. 

Next time I watch a movie like this, I will set myself aside, stare out a window and keep this laptop handy...

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Spaceman

 2024, Johan Renck (Chernobyl) -- Netflix

I have a recurring daydream / dream / vignette story about a lone astronaut on a long journey trapped in solitude with nothing to do but his duties on the spaceship and whatever distractions he was able to bring along with him. There was a time in my past when the idea of imposed solitude was a grand idea for me. I could take all the laundry to the local laundromat and wile away a couple of hours amusing myself. It was me time when I did not have to worry about all the things I should be doing as I was doing this. The same could be applied to any gap in time, between places or between things being done. I could so easily get lost, pleasantly, in my own thoughts and ponderances.

That is so very much not the current state of things. Without constant distraction, any idle time, even a simple walk from the subway to home, lets intrusive thoughts overwhelm me. I cannot be alone with my thoughts anymore for they betray me. Its annoying AF. I miss the idea that I could easily be a lone spaceman where just the act of being alone on a spaceship was actually "getting things done".

Jakub (Adam Sandler, Little Nicky) is a cosmonaut for what I can only assume is an alternate reality Czech Republic. Everything about the movie has the visual flare that mixes Soviet brutalism and American capitalism. Jakub is on a mission to investigate a purple cloud deep in space, one that can be see in the night sky of Earth but nobody knows why it is there, just that it appeared some four years prior. They mention he will be alone for a year, separated from his pregnant wife, but connected to Earth and her by a quantum technology called CzechConnect, basically Facetime with zero lag despite the vast distances.

The problem is that Lenka (Carey Mulligan, Drive), Jakub's wife, has had enough of his distances, and not just the spatial ones. Jakub is a difficult man to be married to. He is aloof, quiet, unemotional and always chooses his duty over her, even agreeing to this journey without much concern for her well-being. She leaves him, refusing to connect. Consequently, Jakub's mental state deteriorates and mission control is concerned. It doesn't help that the toilet screams all night and they won't authorize him to do the necessary repairs. 

Then an alien shows up. Its terrifying. Its a spider but half the size of a person. But it has a soothing voice and tells Jakub (or "skinny human") it has felt his loneliness from afar and has come to talk to him. Failing cameras all over the ship mean nobody ever sees it but him. Is Jakub insane? Is he hallucinating the alien? Does it even matter? In the context of the movie, no it does not.

I get Jakub. I have always been mostly solitary. I don't have a vast number of friends. I am usually quiet and ... well, maybe not "happy" on my own, but usually more comfortable. Or at the very least in small numbers. In the context of work I can do crowds and social interaction, but outside it, I am challenged. Unlike Jakub who has reasons from his past, I have just always been this way, nobody to blame.

The alien, who eventually takes the name Hanuš (Paul Dano, The Batman), wants to help Jakub complete his mission but needs him to acknowledge he is the cause for all his own woes. Jakub, like all solitary people, is stubborn and doesn't want to admit his own faults. Their interaction takes time. And then they arrive at the purple cloud, which Hanuš claims is made up of the beginning of the Universe.

This is one of those times where the direction of the plot takes the exact expected course, in that Jakub does have a realization with Hanuš' help. But its the journey that matters, the way the movie travels, the fun details and little stops along the way. There is no great reveal here, neither in the cloud's existence nor in Jakub's issues (daddy issues) but the melancholy that everything was handled with really spoke to me. I get sadness, I get loneliness,  I get solitude.

Of note, this is one of the movies where Adam Sandler plays against character. I am so used to him putting on his voice. He always sounds a certain way, even when he is playing a character in a non-comedy, but in this movie, he just spoke more plainly than I recall him speaking before. He was clear, articulate and measure. It was refreshing.