A Beloved, Seemingly Unadaptable Book Has Been Transformed Into a Gorgeous Netflix Movie and Oscar Hopeful
Denis Johnson’s award-winning novella Train Dreams—the source material of a new Netflix movie that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year—was first published in the Paris Review in 2002, then made available as a book in 2011. You can read it in 70 to 90 minutes, but somehow that brief spell of time feels almost endless. Before you know it, you’re lost in the woods, much like Robert Grainier, the 20th-century man Johnson makes his subject.
Grainier, an orphan sent to Idaho by train at the age of 6 or 7 with a destination pinned to his coat, is an ordinary person—a laborer who makes a living building railroads, joining seasonal logging crews, and, as an older man, hauling freight with a wagon. “He’d had one lover—his wife, Gladys—owned one acre of property, two horses, and a wagon,” Johnson sums up Grainier’s life, near the end of the novella, in a catalog of experience that neatly pins him as a creature of his time, class, and place: “He’d never been drunk. He’d never purchased a firearm or spoken into a telephone. He’d ridden on trains regularly, many times in automobiles, and once on an aircraft … He had no idea who his parents might have been, and he left no heirs behind him.”
No, Grainier is no boldface name, but the novella’s magic is that it makes his life seem huge to the reader. Johnson’s protagonist is a mild, hard-working man who’s superstitious and trustworthy, a person who is barely formally educated, whose mind constantly searches for an understanding of the meaning of life. This man’s perception of his small hometown, the lumber crews he works on, and his own place in history come to matter deeply to the reader. By the time the novella finishes in a burst of imagery, comparing the howl made by a “wolf-boy” Grainier sees in a circus freak show to the resonances of other sounds of the time—a train whistle, opera singing, foghorns, and bagpipes—you’re fully on board with what Johnson is trying to do.
The film adaptation, directed by Clint Bentley, wants viewing audiences to care about Grainier the way that lovers of the novella do. Joel Edgerton stars as Grainier, Felicity Jones as Gladys, and William H. Macy as an experienced fellow lumberman. Edgerton’s forthright gaze and rough sadness, the movie’s forest milieu (it was filmed in Washington state), and Will Patton’s narration, including lines often taken straight from Johnson’s novella, combine to deliver some of the same awed feelings about the grand design of the world, the smallness of human life, and the bigness of time and space that Johnson’s novella evokes.
But for fans of the source material, the necessary movie-fication of Train Dreams may leave something to be desired. Johnson’s novella was made up of “tufts of seemingly irrelevant material” stuffed into this one small container, as Anthony Doerr wrote for the New York Times Book Review in 2011: “miscellaneous fevers, peripheral anecdotes, a Chinese deportation, a big kid with a weak heart.” In Train Dreams, things happen, even up until the last few pages, that seem like they will connect up and offer some kind of resolution, but never do. Reading it, you feel like you are sitting with Grainier on his deathbed, as he recounts the first stories that come to mind—the people, interactions, and situations that made the biggest impressions on him, whether or not he was ever able to resolve their meaning.
Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar’s film version focuses on the most conventional parts of the story. Prime among these is Grainier’s brief marriage, in his 30s, to Gladys, who dies, along with his baby daughter Kate, in a forest fire while he is away at work on a logging crew. This is, in the movie, the major—almost the only—motivating event of Grainier’s life. We get many flashbacks to his time with Gladys and Kate, who’s rewritten to have been about 2—the right age to walk and talk cutely—when she dies, as opposed to 4 months old in Johnson’s novella. This is a key change, helping give Grainier’s brief period of home life much more significance in the movie. While first grieving, Johnson writes, Grainier “thought of poor little Kate and talked to himself again out loud: ‘She never even growed up to a sprout.’ ” Later, as the grief mellows, Grainier thinks of Gladys more often than his daughter: “Sometimes he thought about Kate, the pretty little tyke, but not frequently. Hers was not such a sad story. She’d hardly been awake, much less alive.” Not so the girl in the film, who’s full of toddler sweetness, and whom Grainier and his wife nickname “Katie.”
Certainly, the deaths of Kate and Gladys shape Grainier in the novella, but not in the self-flagellating, constant-flashbacks, “I should have been there for them” way of the movie. The Grainier of the book lives in a world where many other terrible things also happen, with effects that are obscure or unknowable. Two brutal standalone stories that have been truncated or eliminated in the film mark Grainier’s life in the novella. In one, young Grainier encounters a tramp (a “ ‘boomer,’ as his sort was known”) who is lying in the woods in a terrible state. This man tells Grainier that he’s been robbed by another tramp, who has “cut through the cords” of his knee and left him there to die of gangrene. He goes on to give Grainier a deathbed confession: This tramp used to sexually molest his niece, who got pregnant, was beaten by her father for it (“to drive that poor child out of her belly”), and died. This was the event that put this boomer on the rails: “I’ve never been a hundred yards from these train tracks ever since.”
The second is the tale of Kootenai Bob, a Native American neighbor of Grainier’s, who is transformed in the film into the much more conventional ally and friend character of the storekeeper Ignatius Jack (Nathaniel Arcand). “Kootenai Bob was a steady man who had always refused liquor and worked frequently at jobs in town, just as Grainier did, and they’d known each other for many years,” Johnson writes. We are just introduced to this man, then a few pages later, Johnson writes of his death. Bob accepts shandy—lemonade mixed with beer—from a couple of visiting Canadian ranch hands and believes them when they swear “he could drink this with impunity, as the action of the lemon juice would nullify any effect of the beer.” For the first time, Bob gets drunk, and he passes out across the railroad tracks, where he’s “run over by a succession of trains.” By the next afternoon, “Kootenai Bob was strewn for a quarter mile along the right-of-way,” Johnson writes.
The encounter with the tramp puts young Grainier, who had been aimless, on the straight and narrow. Kootenai Bob’s story is important in Grainier’s life, perhaps, because it’s a sudden tragedy that comes from nowhere, the way the fire did for his family. But the movie wants more easily scannable meaning from its encounters, and, in deleting the tale of the boomer and the fate of Kootenai Bob, and instead adding such scenes as the one where a Black man with a rifle comes into a lumber camp and shoots a worker he says had killed his brother “for the color of his skin,” it gets it.
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There’s one more arc that the movie flattens even further, smoothing over the weirdness of the original tale. In the film, a child shows up at Grainier’s cabin years after the fire that killed his daughter. He believes she is Kate. In Johnson’s novella, however, the people around his town tell one another about a “wolf-girl” who supposedly haunts the forest. Grainier is terrified of the idea, like he would be of a ghost story. But also, he believes he hears Gladys tell him, in a visitation, that she died, but Kate survived the fire. In an episode whose reality is difficult to parse, an older child appears at the cabin, with eyes that “sparked greenly in the lamplight, like those of any wolf” and a face “that of a wolf, but hairless.” She’s injured, and has no hair; “she’d snatched herself nearly bald.” She growls, barks, and snaps, and has “leathery” skin, like an old man, “calloused stumps” for wrists, a face that seemed “to have no life behind it when the eyes were closed”—a child like an animal.
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Is this really Kate? Is Kate a wolf? Did any child at all appear at his dwelling? It’s an open-ended moment, showing us the witchy liminality of the landscape and the susceptible nature of Grainier’s mind. In the film, all these lupine qualities are gone. The child visitor has black hair, where Kate had blond; otherwise, she’s just a normal kid. While it’s odd that she’s shown up at Grainier’s cabin, injured, in the middle of the night, she’s no visitation, just a human mystery.
This new Train Dreams delves deep into a father’s sadness, giving us a story that’s more about Grainier’s one big grief than it is about the side tales and odd supernatural moments Johnson stuffs into his re-creation of a bygone world. It’s still beautiful, moving, and thoughtful. And perhaps all these choices make sense—a true adaptation of Johnson’s Train Dreams would probably be far too tufty to wind up on Netflix.
