海角大神

鈥淭rain Dreams,鈥� set mostly in the early 20th century in the Pacific Northwest, is a beautiful tone poem of a movie. I hesitate to say that only because it implies something woozy and precious. 鈥淭rain Dreams鈥� is anything but.

It鈥檚 about Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), a logger who lived as an itinerant laborer until he met Gladys (Felicity Jones), got married, and fathered a baby girl. Having a family gives a measure of meaning to his existence. He builds a cabin by a river in their rural Idaho town but is away much of the time on logging jobs. He worries that his baby daughter doesn鈥檛 know who he is.

Much of the film鈥檚 complicated power comes from the realization that, as much as he cherishes his family, Robert is also spiritually sustained by the forests he glories in. He finds meaning there, too, and he shares with many of the other loggers an almost pantheistic appreciation for the living things they topple. 鈥淭rain Dreams鈥� 鈥� gracefully directed by Clint Bentley, who co-wrote the script with his frequent collaborator Greg Kwedar 鈥� is based on a 2011 Denis Johnson novella that is almost cinematic in its sensual depictions of the natural world. But Johnson also provided an overlay of magical realism that the film for the most part wisely avoids. The focus is on how Robert reconciles his dual existences, and how he somehow survives when tragedy hits.

Robert is in the strong-silent tradition usually intended to convey hidden depths. It鈥檚 a dubious tradition that often equates muteness with wisdom, and 鈥淭rain Dreams鈥� doesn鈥檛 entirely escape that trap. Perhaps recognizing the problem, the filmmakers periodically provide a voice-over narrator (Will Patton) to fill us in on what Robert is experiencing. But Edgerton is the rare actor who can fully communicate a character using the sparest of means. He doesn鈥檛 simplify Robert or turn him into a loamy 鈥渕an of the earth鈥� stereotype. What is so poignant about Robert is that he is a man of great feeling who is not really in touch with how he feels. He is bewildered by what life throws at him. When despair hits, his sorrow may be the only thing that sustains him.

Netflix 漏 2025

Edgerton portrays a logger who adores his wife and baby daughter, but whose work keeps him away from the family farm.

He also understands that his agrarian way of life is fading away in a newly industrialized era. He sees himself, however faintly, as a relic. The film includes sequences that carry Robert many years into the future, when he flies in an airplane and looks down on the land he once worked. But the heart of the story takes place decades before.

Most resonant are the scenes with the other loggers, many of whom are itinerants without families. The filmmakers don鈥檛 sentimentalize these men 鈥� in an early scene, they fatally attack a Chinese laborer on the crew. But the film鈥檚 degree of observation is so acute that we are never made to feel we are watching a 鈥減eriod鈥� drama with actors made up to look the part. And it helps that many of the men are as loquacious as Robert is silent. Their jawboning punctuates the stillnesses in the forest. Best is William H. Macy as Arn Peeples, a veteran dynamiter. (Macy clearly relishes playing someone named Arn Peeples.) He perfectly embodies how Johnson describes him in the novella 鈥� 鈥渁 frail and shrunken gadabout, always yammering, staying out of the way of hard work, the oldest man in the woods.鈥�

The paradox of 鈥淭rain Dreams鈥� is that we are looking at a vanishing way of life that, at the same time, has a startling immediacy. That immediacy is more than a matter of careful observation. In its widest sense, the movie is asking what makes life worth living. When Robert encounters Claire, a woman from the U.S. Forest Service with her own hardship to bear 鈥� beautifully played in a cameo by Kerry Condon 鈥� she tells him that a dead tree is just as important as a living one. All are part of a sublime order. Robert yearns to find ways to move on from sorrow. The great revelation he half expects never comes. But in a way, it does. He lives out a long life that indeed was worth living.

Peter Rainer is the Monitor鈥檚 film critic. 鈥淭rain Dreams鈥� is rated PG-13 for some violence and sexuality.