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For a relatively young country, America has inflicted an enormous amount of suffering on human beings. Maybe there’s some cosmic payback in the fact that life here in the 19th and early 20the centuries, particularly in the west, could be brutal. Men who took on dangerous work and didn’t live to tell the tale, women who died in childbirth or, just as tragically, lost children to infant mortality: maybe tragedies like that are just attendant to the hubris of being a white person trying to settle down in a big, sprawling country. Maybe Americans shouldn’t have so much reverence for their groundbreaking forebears—and yet, when we think about the whatever-it-is that defines the thing we so cavalierly call the American character, it’s those people who come to mind: tough men who built railroads and cut timber, women who held down the fort at home, as comfortable cradling a baby as they were killing and plucking a chicken. We think of our American predecessors as strong people, conveniently forgetting some of the terrible things they did, like deporting populations whom they perceived as standing in the way of their dreams and ambitions.
Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, a gorgeous, somber movie adapted from Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella and set largely in early 20th century Idaho, doesn’t romanticize the hardscrabble Americans who struggled to make America great the first time around. But it treats them as real people who, whatever their faults might have been, were simply trying to do their best in building a life for themselves and their families. Joel Edgerton plays Robert Grainier, an orphan who grows up to be a stolid working man. He’s so recessive you can’t imagine him meeting a woman, but he does—it’s she who approaches him after church services one day—and eventually, circa 1917, the two marry and build a small house by the river. Gladys (Felicity Jones) is one of those ultra-capable women who not only knows how to build a fish trap—a…
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