Riding the Rails with “Train Dreams”

Among the ten movies nominated by the Academy for Best Picture, there were a few that were unfamiliar to me. To be honest, I hadn’t kept up with some of the year’s best foreign-language films, like Brazil’s The Secret Agent. Nor did I feel much inclination to check out the Oscar-nominated racing flick known as F1. Though it didn’t, of course, get named Best Picture, it did take home a statuette for its true-to-life sound design. As I write this in my home office, I’m hearing plenty of souped-up cars racing past my window. Why on earth would I want to go to a movie and listen to more of that screeching and rumbling?

 On the Best Picture top-ten list, there was one small American art film that I did feel obliged to view. A popular Oscar preview broadcast is hosted each year by my favorite L.A. public radio station, LAist. Shortly before the Oscar ceremony, the station’s critics annually gather to weigh in on the candidates in all the top categories, after which the audience applauds for its favorites. To my surprise, a little movie called Train Dreams got a big reaction from the crowd, as well as from the critics. Some of the latter actually called it the most memorable movie of 2025. So I absolutely needed to see what the excitement was about.

 Train Dreams started out as a 2011 novella by the acclaimed Denis Johnson. Though Johnson, the son of a U.S. State Department operative, grew up all over the globe, this book represents a rich slice of Americana. It focuses on the quiet but eventful life of Robert Grainier, an orphan who first rides a train in 1893 when (at age 7) he’s sent to meet his adoptive family in Fry, Idaho, As he grows up in these rustic surroundings, he remains directionless until he meets a young woman named Gladys. They marry, build a log cabin by the side of a river, and welcome a young daughter they name Kate.

 Though Grainier yearns to live at home with his growing family, his best source of income is  helping to build the Spokane International Railway. Camping out with his co-workers, he meets kind and gentle men, but also bigots who torture their Chinese immigrant co-workers and inflict vengeance on outsiders. Grainier also takes in the natural beauty of the forest, as well as the danger always lurking in the background as men fell giant trees and handle explosives. When he decides to return home for good, he learns that disaster has stricken his loved ones in his absence. That’s pretty much the whole story, which follows Grainier up until his death in 1968, Toward the end of his life, he watches on television John Glenn’s foray into outer space, and sees the earth spread out below him from his seat in a biplane. A narrator solemnly tells us that during this ride into the heavens, "as he misplaced all sense of up and down, he felt, at last, connected to it all."

 It’s a beautifully shot movie that certainly earns its four Oscar nominations, especially the one for cinematography. It’s also slow and solemn, and definitely an acquired taste. For me the biggest surprise is that three of the four main actors—Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones as his wife, and Kerry Condon as a forestry service worker with her own sorrows—turn out to be born and raised overseas. Only William H. Macy, playing a wise old coot, is  actually American-born. Surely there’s a good reason why Americans aren’t playing Americans. Any thoughts?

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Everything But the Bathroom Sink: “The Brutalist”

You can’t say that writer/director Brady Corbet lacks ambition. During the three hours and thirty-five minutes of screentime that make up The Brutalist, he shoehorns in such pressing topics as racial and ethnic bias, religious intolerance, drug addiction, sexual perversity, and what it feels like to be an artist in thrall to a wealthy businessman. I’d heard that The Brutalist is the story of a Holocaust survivor, and so it is. But for the Hungarian architect László Tóth, a proud product of Bauhaus training before Hitler came to power, America is not much of an improvement over Nazi Germany. In fact, the movie as a whole turns out to be an unrelieved diatribe against American life disguised as an immigrant saga.

Brutalism, as the film never gets around to explaining, is a school of design that became popular in the postwar years, one that features massive forms and heavy, raw materials like concrete. This is the style of the building project that dominates the film: Tóth’s design for an elaborate community center complete with library and chapel. The ideas are his (and a brief laudatory moment in the film’s epilogue finally makes clear to us how impressive they are). But the money comes from an impulsive and irascible tycoon who likes to be viewed (when it suits him) as a champion of modern art. He’s Harrison Lee Van Buren, and the name itself seems a ham-fisted way of reminding us that he’s American to the core. And, especially in a late-in-the-film scene where he’s truly—and unconvincingly—vicious to his protégé, he can be considered a brutalist too. 

The two main actors in this epic drama deserve praise. Adrien Brody, who won an Oscar back in 2002 for portraying a Polish Holocaust victim in The Pianist, is the ideal choice to play the long-suffering László. Tall and thin, with unkempt hair and a wild look in his eye, he seems about to cry even in moments when he’s genuinely happy. I was also impressed by Guy Pearce as the proud, mercurial rich man who holds László’s future in his hands. (I recall I first discovered Pearce, in a very different mood, as a drag queen in Australia’s 1994 hit, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.)  But in the key role of László’s wife, an invalid who is unable to reunite with her beloved spouse until the film is half over, the usually reliable Felicity Jones struck me as unconvincing. Her accent, for one thing, seems effortful. But she’s also been asked by the script to behave in ways that seem well outside the range of what’s possible for her. 

That’s my number-one problem with The Brutalist. The central characters in the film quite often behave not like human beings but like symbols I could cite many examples: moments of extreme love and extreme hate appear in the story not because they’re consistent with a character’s inner workings but because they make a point that the director (who’s also the writer) deems important. For instance, while I can understand László’s ardent natural sexuality coming to the fore at inappropriate times, what we see on screen always seems to be a message from Corbet to the viewer. 

My moviegoing companion— someone who shared my experience of this long, drawn-out, rather lugubrious story (thank heavens for that intermission!)—commented later that it was much more enjoyable to discuss the film afterwards than it was to sit through it. Yes, The Brutalist can’t be faulted for the strength of its ideas. But I couldn’t get past the clashing of all those symbols.