SYNOPSIS: In “Train Dreams,” a new drama set in the early 20th century and now playing in theatres, Joel Edgerton plays Robert Grainier, a logger and railway construction worker who plays witness to the decline of the old frontier as the world as world is transformed by trains, automobiles and changing times. “It’s all going by so fast,” says Grainier’s wife Gladys (Felicity Jones).
CAST: Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones, Clifton Collins Jr., Kerry Condon and William H. Macy. Directed by Clint Bentley, who co-wrote the screenplay with Greg Kwedar.
REVIEW: Based on the novella by Denis Johnson, “Train Dreams” is an elegiac look at nature, love, life and the passage of time.
Joel Edgerton plays Robert Grainier, an itinerant worker as a logger and on the railway in the Pacific Northwest. Orphaned at a young age, his life is changed forever when he meets and marries Gladys (Felicity Jones), who brings stability to his life. Despite long, money-making stints in the logging camps, he becomes a devoted father to daughter Kate.
When tragedy strikes, Robert is left alone, “waiting to see what we were left here for.”
“Train Dreams” moves at its own speed. The lovingly considered, deliberately paced story of a man of few words, it’s a quiet movie that speaks loudly on the connectedness of the earth and the people who live on it.
Edgerton hands in a career best performance as the stoic Robert. He’s a tough man, unambitious, but unafraid of hard work. Happy with simple pleasures, his innate understanding that life is a series of moments to be savored reveals the heart of a poet. It’s that spirit that gives the movie its soul as Robert navigates his journey of joy, sadness and healing.
Beautiful cinematography by Adolpho Veloso captures the land’s ruggedness, creating a lyrical backdrop for the story’s beauty and brutality. As Robert comes to understand his connection to the land, the forest he helped decimate as a logger becomes a character in this man’s life story of loss and love.
“Train Dreams” is a lovely, contemplative movie about the attempts to understand the ephemeral aspects of life. There’s no spectacle, no grandstanding, just intimate, poignant grace notes of one man’s existence.
SYNOPSIS: Set in a small, dusty New Mexico town, the satirical neo-Western “Eddington,” starring Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal and now playing in theatres, sees a humiliated man pushed to extremes in the early days of the pandemic.
CAST: Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Luke Grimes, Deirdre O’Connell, Micheal Ward, Austin Butler, and Emma Stone. Written and directed by Ari Aster.
REVIEW: No one will accuse writer-director Ari Aster of a lack of ambition. “Eddington” throws a handful of genres—neo-Western, political satire, dark comedy, and thriller—into a blender to tell a chaotic story of the early pandemic era. At 145 minutes Aster digs deep into a specific time in the summer of 2020 when the world was turned up-side down by COVID, social distancing, George Soros conspiracy theories, Bitcoin, post truth and any other number of hot button topics. It was a time of ideological whiplash that Aster essays in a film that addresses those powder-keg topics without completely lighting the fuse.
Joaquin Phoenix is Joe Cross, sheriff of the sleepy little town of Eddington, New Mexico and husband to Louise (Emma Stone), a complex woman who suffers from anxiety. Her fragile mental state is exacerbated by her mother Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), a conspiracy obsessed who never met a bit of misinformation she couldn’t embrace.
Joe’s anti-mask stance—”There’s no COVID-19 in Eddington,” he says—puts him in conflict with Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), Eddington’s incumbent mayor now running for re-election.
As outside influences take hold in Eddington, anti-racist protests break out on their lone main drag in response to the death of George Floyd, and calls to de-fund the police ring in Joe’s ears.
As Joe and Ted’s personal and professional animosities grow, the sheriff takes matters into his own hands and announces his bid to run for mayor. With slogans like “Joe Cross for Air! Joe Cross for Mayor!” and “Try No Corruption for a Change,” Joe’s run at public office leads him to down a dangerous and deadly path.
The action described above plays out against a background of news and social media reports of the turbulent social, political, and economic climate that were the earmarks of the era, adding to the film’s unsettled feel.
Unlike most Westerns, even recent neo-Westerns, this isn’t a story of good guys vs. bad guys. In “Eddington,” everyone is morally ambiguous, and while you may like some characters over others, all are damaged, driven by ego, selfishness, greed or ideology.
As Sheriff Joe, Phoenix is a weak man in a job that requires strength and decisiveness, qualities that seem foreign to him until he is pushed up against a wall. A flip on the usual, stoic main figure in a typical Western, this is a guy whose character flaws make up his character. Phoenix isn’t afraid to make him pathetic, and in doing so, delivers another interesting, edgy performance. He’s a walking metaphor, an emasculated man emblematic of the fears and concerns that defined the uncertain, divisive summer of 2020.
He’s a complex guy, an attribute that can’t be said of any of the film’s other characters.
As the smooth-talking mayor, Pascal’s laid-back performance is an antidote to the film’s intensity, but the character doesn’t give him much room to maneuver. Ditto Emma Stone, whose limited screen time reveals a committed performance but little else.
On the plus side, “Eddington” is a confrontational experience, a provocative recreation of the unsettling chaos of the pandemic years and its effect on humanity. On the debit side of the leger, Aster’s reluctance to dig beneath the film’s unsettled surface puts a dull edge on the film’s satire.
I suppose enough time has elapsed so that a film like “Lucky Day” can no longer be seen simply as a Quentin Tarantino rip off but can now be regarded as an homage to the crime movies of the 1990s, especially when it is directed by Roger Avary, the co-writer of “Pulp Fiction.”
The film takes place during one eventful and bloody day. It begins with Red (Luke Bracey), a safecracker with an artist wife Chloe (Nina Dobrev) and adorable daughter Beatrice (Ella Ryan Quinn), finishing up a two-year jail sentence for a heist gone wrong. As low lifes go he’s a decent sort. He’s a just a guy who robbed a bank and skimmed half a million bucks to look after his family.
Luc (Crispin Glover) doesn’t quite see it that way. He’s a hitman for a crime cartel called The Connection. “I’m in the retirement business,” he tells border security in his outrageous and completely fake French accent. He’s come to California to “retire” Red. Seems Luc’s brother was part of Red’s team but was killed in action and now the faux Frenchman has come to exact his revenge.
“Pulp Fiction,” for better and for worse, inspired a slew of imitators complete with over-the-top violence, groovy yet quirky soundtracks, old-school details and unusual characters. And don’t forget the irreverent, edgy and politically incorrect dialogue.
“Lucky Day” falls firmly into the Pretend “Pulp Fiction” category.
It’s a movie with all the bits and pieces of the Tarantino classic but with a tenth of the impact. To be fair, Avary pulls charming performances from the cast, crafting the kind of eccentric, cartoonish characters that fuel these kind of films but nothing really connects. From start to finish you know who will survive and who won’t so the stakes never seem very high even when Luc has nice people in the crosshairs of his gun.
In “Lucky Day” Avary has made a buoyant, if predictable thriller, efficiently told, with some laughs and a gallon or ten of blood to paint the screen. It’s not “Pulp Fiction” but then again, what is?
