chop chop, those precious ecosystems aren't going
to destroy themselves
dir: Clint Bentley
2025
It’s being called one of the films of the year, which is all well and good, but now that I’ve watched it, it’s my time to pontificate about it.
It’s okay but it’s no masterpiece. It’s a very small film, not in scope or in terms of visuals, but in terms of being like a miniature portrait of a quiet man, who didn’t do much of anything, yet felt haunted all his live long life.
Sure, Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) worked as a logger and on the laying of tracks for a railroad in the Pacific North West, but you could hardly say he built the American empire that would take over that whole continent (and reduced those great forests to the 13% of the total that remain). And his whole life, as depicted here, has him more as bystander, observer to his own experiences, rather than active participant in the eight decades that he lives through.
It would not be fair to say he’s passive in the face of his own life, which spans much of the early twentieth century, but he really doesn’t do much, and all his struggles are mostly internal, and we’re told about them at great length via ceaseless voice over. I guess it would be impossible to do otherwise. Without it the majority of the flick would be Joel Edgerton standing around looking sad and / or pensive, and not saying much of anything, for decades. A lifetime of quiet desperation, if you will.
And that would be enough for a lot of people, including me. He’s really good at it (looking pensive, though he’s good at sitting or standing around as well). It’s not so much brooding as looking haunted. He is haunted from beginning to end, and maybe it’s not entirely his fault.
From early in his life he wonders if he has been cursed. Having grown up without parents and having worked from a young age, with little schooling, he goes wherever he can work, but rarely connects with any of the men he works with. He works with one man of Chinese origins, working unflaggingly to cut through trees. They don’t have a language in common, but they can still work together.
While they’re working one day other men helping build a wooden rail bridge walk up to the Chinese chap, grab him by his arms and legs, and then just fling him off the bridge, from a great height, to his death. They never say why, and Robert keeps asking why, but he also, at a point, seems like he grabs the man’s ankle to help them carry him off.
“What’s he done?” he keeps asking, but is that enough? Maybe he wasn’t helping them, but he didn’t stop them either. Robert remembers that man’s face for the rest of his days, despite knowing he couldn’t have stopped what was to happen, a curse doesn’t have to be fair.
It’s not as clear in the film as it is in the novella that Robert’s confusion over what the Chinese man is saying leads him to think that the man is cursing him, as in, applying a curse on him that will follow him through life, rather than just saying in his own language about how unfair this all is. Robert carries that reproach with him, those eyes condemning his actions or his inactions, with everything that is to follow, for decades.
Despite feeling that he is cursed, when he meets Gladys (Felicity Jones) he believes that the home and hearth are possible for him; that a family and a homestead, rather than the peripatetic life of a working nomad, is something that is possible for a man like him.
All his scenes with his soon to be wife and child are mostly shot either in candle light or what some reviewers derisively call “golden hour” lighting, being that time before sunset in which all of God’s / Satan’s creation seems to be bathed in a benevolent glow.
What is wrong with that, you might ask, and from my perspective, nothing, nothing at all. It’s important for films, which last I checked are a visual medium, to look clear and great, as much as possible. Shooting your subjects and their environments in the best, most artful ways possible would seem to be key to a job well done as a cinematographer. Adolpho Veloso as the DP does a tremendous job, it’s truly a beautiful looking film, and I have no doubt he’ll get a nod in the best cinematography category during awards season.
Where reviewers or critics trip up over mocking the use of “golden hour” or low light trickery is when they make the accusation of the visual aesthetics attempting to make up for a lack of engagement with the emotional elements of the story. Of course idyllic scenes filmed at such a time will look great, and are meant to goose the audience into feeling feelings they otherwise might not feel.
Any technique can be overused, but I don’t feel like that’s what happens here, in the same way that even though voiceovers can be obtrusive, I didn’t find that it was obtrusive here. Without it we would have long wordless stretches, maybe the majority of the film, and we wouldn’t have an insight into Robert’s inner world, and we would wonder if he had one.
At the times where we don’t need it, we don’t get it, because Edgerton can show us how he feels about all the trials and tribulations that he faces. But that’s only a fraction of the flick.
The other element that could have been abused is the score or soundtrack, and with the exception of a crudely misplaced Nick Cave song right at the end, it doesn’t do that at all. Bryce Dessner, perhaps better known as one of the twin brother guitarist members of The National, does fine, basically mimicking an Alexandre Desplat score with little trouble.
Still, it’s not that memorable. Comparisons have been made to the films of Terrence Malick, and the thing is, who am I to complain about such references? I feel like the Malick comparison is a lazy one. Sure, Malick is famous for visually sweeping scenes of wheat fields and overwhelming nature, juxtaposing the insignificance of (very attractive actors) humanity in the face of such primal beauty, with whispered voiceovers over the top, and them actors not doing much either than standing around in these immaculately composed spaces / scenes.
That’s not what’s going on here. The use and abuse of voiceover in Malick’s films has to do with the fact that he, as a director, is not interested on the most part with actors delivering dialogue to other actors standing near them whilst filming it. He’d rather have someone remembering a girl on a swing with a voiceover describing the differences between potato cakes and potato scallops based on regional preferences as Japanese soldiers shoot at them from a Mitsubishi Zero even as the actor trails their hand through the tops of a sea of grass…
This flick is nowhere near that pretentious.
And yet, I didn’t really feel much of anything while watching it.
I was in a perfectly good mood watching it, no substances were in my bloodstream, legal or otherwise, it wasn’t too late, so I wasn’t too tired. All the stars were aligned, my dog wasn’t around to bark at the horses or dogs onscreen, and yet I felt little if anything for Robert’s plight, his struggles, his dreams, train related or otherwise.
I thought about these elements, I intellectually appreciated the levels it was working on and the story it was telling, but I didn’t feel it. There is something distancing about how it’s put together, whether it’s the story as told or the way the story is told.
Robert suffers great loss in his life, devastating loss, and tries to rebuild, but he is a hermit so withdrawn from his own life and the world in general that when it’s pointed out to him that he’s a hermit, he’s somewhat surprised.
There are other stories that delight in the life lived on one’s own terms, in the beauty and isolation of nature, in tune with the world around them rather than fighting against it, but this isn’t that story either.
Later in life after not much of anything having happened he almost connects with another person living a life of quiet desperation in self-imposed exile (Kerry Condon), but even that peters out. We are told that Robert finally, towards the end, starts to understand that he’s connected to the world around him in all the seen and unseen ways, but we don’t see it, don’t feel it, don’t experience him expressing it in any way.
The world moved on and left him behind, like it does for all of us, but I guess this story doesn’t pander to the idea that through loss and tragedy Robert found a way to live a meaningful life. His life and death end up meaning nothing, less than nothing, and I guess that’s okay rather than having some treacly sentiment expressed in such a way as to foster the illusion that it’s all worthwhile because of [insert life-affirming cliché here].
At least they don’t insult our intelligence that way.
Despite not feeling much of anything for any of this on a personal level, I did still appreciate the artistry involved, and the performance that Joel Edgerton gives. It’s not easy for actors to convey a lot of the ideas that I’ve covered talking about this flick through silence, through immobility, through how they carry themselves, and Edgerton does a wonderful job throughout.
It feels very, very unfair saying this, but in the end I just don’t think he’s playing that interesting a character. I know, I KNOW how rude and dismissive that sounds. I have plenty of time for taciturn, world-weary characters who’ve suffered and struggled and who have their travels and torments written across their faces. I just found that Robert Grainier really wasn’t even as interesting as the characters who briefly pop up, like the ones played by William H Macy (who’s pretty annoying and really very good) as Arn Peeples, or actor / director John Diehl as the real old timer Billy.
The camera here loves people’s faces, loves really getting in there, really showing every laugh line and wrinkle, the topography of these actors’ faces.
I wanted to like it more than I did, but that’s okay. It is in no way a bad flick, it’s just not a great one. But it’s pretty good, in a lot of ways.
7 times seems like a lot of men would rather spend 60 years on their own than ever get therapy out of 10
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“I've seen bad men raised up and good men brought to their knees. I reckon if I could figure it out, I'd be sleeping next to someone a lot better-looking than you.” – harsh but fair - Train Dreams
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